I have a core i7 965, I got it half price (ES) and it is solid at 4.35Ghz with 1.36V, hardly suicidal and much less than what some cpu's use like phenom II 940's for overclocking. This will obviously outperform a 5Ghz X3, or 6Ghz for that matter. It is much more efficient per clock.

W, show me a screenshot where you run prime for 8 hours stability at 5Ghz then, I haven't seen anyone on www.ocforums.com with a Phenom II over 4Ghz stable at 1.45-1.5V, with standard air or water cooling.

"I find the single core, 1.8 GHz Athlon 3000+ more than enough for all my activities, including gaming (with a 8600 GT). Any suggestions? "

See title. Also, I hope you quickly move past Tetris and try some Mass Effect & Far Cry 2 @ at least 1680x1050 or 1080p cranked with AA and AF.

U numb nut, ofcoarse it benches and works fine... its just if i play for hours and hours that i put the bloody fan on.. keep in mind that in SA the ambient temp get far above 35deg cel...
+ a 4870 x 2 making things even harder

What about a bet that this thing will knock the socks of a core I 920 that my b in law owns...

this processor is a third of the price compared to the i 920 and hell... with a bit of tweaking or if i get liq cooling ... temp will allow me to push to 5.5 or a bit more

AMD U RULE, Brute Horses coming from that chip,

"Nothing has changed...

I hate to be the bearer of bad news to the AMD folks, but the Intel Core i7 is still more powerful per Hz. Both in multimedia and in games Intel is still more powerful and has a more efficient microarchitecture. So what if you can overclock the bejesus out of a CPU?? That's great for the 1% of computer owners who actually overclock, but for the remainder of the "crowd" it means nothing. No thanks AMD, I'll keep a hold onto my Core i7 CPU as it is still the best choice out there :D
posted by : Mr. Bad News, 26 March 2009"

Here's some bad news: People like you still are breathing my oxygen.

How does a clock for clock comparison occur when one chip is 280 dollars at 2.6ghz and one is 150 dollars being shown at 6 ghz?

Talking about this gives me a migraine.

No more oxygen for you.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news to the AMD folks, but the Intel Core i7 is still more powerful per Hz. Both in multimedia and in games Intel is still more powerful and has a more efficient microarchitecture. So what if you can overclock the bejesus out of a CPU?? That's great for the 1% of computer owners who actually overclock, but for the remainder of the "crowd" it means nothing. No thanks AMD, I'll keep a hold onto my Core i7 CPU as it is still the best choice out there :D

i think phenom II 940 owns world record in the 3dmark benchmark. After i7 beated it b4, a new world record was set with 940 running at really high speed, i think theinq posted it some time ago

What's with all these people saying things like "No one needs more processing power", "this is fast enough" and "it's all marketing hype".

There are a TON of applications out there that will benefit from faster CPUs, just because the average user is fine with current speeds doesn't mean everyone is.

I'm an electronic musician and my biggest limiting factor (and has been for 10 years) is CPU power.

Not just power, but efficiency. Think about how much more electricity we'd be using if we had all decided that a Pentium 4 was enough processing power and stopped there.

No processor anywhere, ever, will ever truly be fast enough.

Yeah, for massive processing number of cores seems to be the winner these days (rendering video, folding, etc). Games have been GPU bound for almost a decade.

I run a panzy 2GHz sempron and have had no problems playing the latest games on max settings with my HD4800. Sure, maybe if i was a professional FPSer i'd need those extra clocks to squeeze out every last fps/net latency, but the fact remains. CPU speed is dead. It's all marketing hype now.

I'm pretty sure it isn't usable at those frequencies. Anyone can do sky-high overclocks. Booting windows is one thing and surviving a full benchmark run is another.

Besides, all these ultra-high overclocks use suicide voltages. These aren't for daily use, these are just for show-off. The chips die very quickly at those voltages. And GHz isn't everything. I'm sure a 5 GHz i7 can beat the socks off this thing at 6 GHz. It's not just GHz, it's IPC (instructions per cycle) multiplied by GHz.

<font What was the voltage on this slight overclock? Stock?</font

ooh and htnakirs, what kinda games are you playing with that hot setup?

well, depends what you want to do with your computer. fair enough that you find a 1.8 ghz athlon 3000+ and 8600gt 'more than enough for all (your) activities', but i for one would be happier with photorealistic graphic rendering, instantaneous ultra high-def video and audio encoding (i.e. you click on 'encode' and it's done) (actually for that matter how about the ability to manipulate any dataset, of any size, in realtime), full speech and body (read gesture ala 'minority report') recognition, unbreakable data encryption... in fact anything that an athlon 3000+ can do (and some things that it can't), only done instantly. bring on the (transistor) wall!

I had thought that the discussion had shifted from more GHz to power efficiency etc. Apparently not.
Taking a hint from Olympus in the digicam field which announced that 12 MP is enough for humanity and they would henceforth shift focus to other aspects of image capture and not blindly increase pixel count - and I agree - I was wondering, how much GHz is enough for CPU cores?
I find the single core, 1.8 GHz Athlon 3000+ more than enough for all my activities, including gaming (with a 8600 GT). Any suggestions?

ou are such a giant tard, it is not because of your intel cpu that when you click something three windows pop up at once. i suggest you go back to your dells and leave computers to those with IQ's above my labradors.

its possible, its running but it needs a factory fan keeping the box 100% ventalted all the time

So come on i7, show me some of that

I was thinking whether to get a X4 or X3 and this settles it! X3 all the way.
Core (blimey) is not getting a look in cus I hate the way Intel CPUs "forget" what they were doing and leave me wondering if I'm going nuts thinking I clicked on something or just CPU gone nuts. After 3 windows pop up at the same time I know its Intel.

Any board with advanced clock calibration has the potential to do so.

Depends on the chip whether it's possible, not all chips can be unlocked.

Does CPU-Z Always report on the 4 cores on the X3? I know some mobo's you can enable it, but I wasn't aware gigabytes could.