Saturday, September 19, 2009

LGA1156 platform impression

Intel's attempt to make nahalem architecture cheap.Perform great, priced reasonable but its not without its issues.
My greatest concern is the flood of reviews out there, with most of them reporting lynnfield temperature using aftermarket HSF and not intel's default.Because those who really get these new chips back into their rig, with no aftermarket HSF available locally(singapore) during purchase, will get the shock of their life.Intel stock HSF is probably 50% smaller than LGA775 for dual core. Slim, small and tiny, isnt something to look for in any HSF,couldnt even get the job done even without overclock. If 80C for i5 750 and 95C for i7 870 is normal for intel, then i think it needs to wake up their bloody idea.Whats even more surprising is the intensive cover up or lack of report by tech reviews globally, making one not think that something fishy is going on.
LGA1366 which is for the "real" nahalem platform got its fan mounting hole layout change, due to large increase in cpu size compared to LGA775.But changing the mounting hole again for LGA1156?WTFOMGBBQ.Bribe from aftermarket HSF companies?We dont know and most probably never will.All we definitely know is it obsoletes all aftermarket HSF even from LGA1366 and forces you to buy a brand new HSF because the stock cooling suck balls.
As emphasized by intel, lynnfield greatest strength other than its a cheaper platform is the more aggresive turbo boost technology that allows +4 multiplier during single thread operations.I admit this is the first nahalem cpu i own after it being released for more than a year,mainly due to financial problem as a slave in the singapore armed forces.But such highly advertise feature, should be activated by default, or so i thought.Many vendors of motherboard, including mine(asus), have it partially enabled only which result in a maximum of +1 multiplier boost even in single thread scenario.Only after hours of digging for similar problems did i find the root of the problem, you have to enable c state options pretty deep in the bios configuration...
LGA1156 is a "budget" nahalem so feature reduction and corners being cut is meant to happen, but above mentioned problesm isnt unacceptable.But sucks to be us consummer living in a period where theres no competition at the high end sector,all we can do, like in SAF, is SUCK THUMB.

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