p55 vs x58, for my personal scenario

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watanabe

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 7, 2000
Messages
502
So I just came from a pII 940BE @3.8GHz, probably didn't have to upgrade, but I did as I spend a lot of time waiting for render's to finish as an architecture student.

I now have a Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD4/core i7 860 and 4GB of ram. Also, before I bought this, I bought a watercooling system (also in sig) and a corsair 800D.

What I'm really excited about is sandy bridge, and these upgrades were to hold me over until then.

My question is this:

I recently built 2 pc's for my classmates, and have the opportunity to swap my current mb/proc/ram for one of their i7 920/6gb/msi x58m motherboards (the reason being they don't overclock, 2.93ghz 860(turbo multiplier seems unlocked on my UD4) will actually be a bit faster than the 920 in their case.

The reason I wanted to do this is I'm impatient and don't want to wait for Swiftech to release the 1156 mount hardware, however there are a few reasons I'm hesitating on swapping:

I initially went with the 860 for the lower TDP, so I could take this and put it in my silverstone sg03 later for a htpc/server/etc. Additionally, the gigabyte ud4 seems to be a better built board than the MSI x58m.

ud4: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128404
x58m: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130227

Thoughts?

cliffs:
i7 920/6gb ram/msi 6phase mb
i7 860/4gb ram/gigabyte 12phase mb + $10 1156 waterblock mount + 2 week wait + better heat for future use in HTPC.
 
I'd probably go with the LGA1366 setup, although if you're really serious about using your hardware in an HTPC in the future, you probably would be better off sticking with what you've got (although for an HTPC, either one would be way overkill).
 
All else being equal, both systems will perform about the same (when overclocked). However, I would go with the i7 920 due to the 6GB of RAM which can run in triple channel.
 
It would be more benefit for you to go with x58 since corei7 is stronger than corei5 by a good amount of power.
 
I've only owned one MSI mobo but didn't like it. The 1366 mobo gives you the upgrade option to the 6 core Gulftown when it comes out which sounds like it might benefit you but it'll probably cost north of $900 at first. I'd probably just stick with the 1156/860 for now.
 
1156/860 not a bad setup but I went back to 920 just faster for me but I'm a gamer and use sli. 920 also was a little more stable for me.
 
As others have said, I'd stick with 1366 to give yourself better upgrade options, but if you're going to turn it into HTPC, stick with 1156.
 
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