Originally posted by theonejrs:

---

Originally posted by sammorris:

---

I have seen hardly any evidence of FX-8150s selling at all from the online community. They haven't been quite as much of an economical flop as a technological flop, but they still haven't really made much of an impact.

Llano on the other hand has been selling pretty well, and as a low-end all-in-one system for HTPCs and the likes, it's one of the best options out there.

Ivy Bridge has turned out to be a failure, there is literally no reason to buy one if you already have any i5/i7, let alone a sandy bridge CPU - the performance/mhz is roughly the same, around a 5% gain, the base clock speeds are the same too, so out of the box they're no faster. They use less power, but due to a badly designed heatspreader they run hotter than their sandy bridge counterparts, and are therefore less easily overclocked, so all the advantages of having lower power consumption from 22nm silicon are lost. In effect, Ivy Bridge is almost like Intel's Bulldozer.

---

Sam,

It's funny, the FX chips sell well in the US, yet don't seem to sell well in the UK? There are 6 available models of the Zambezi (not Bulldozer), and 4 of those sell very well in the US. there have been problems with the FX-4170 4.2GHz Quad core with heat issues and the FX-6200 3.8GHz Quad core, that generally doesn't overclock very well. As you know, I have a lot of faith in Newegg's reviews, because most times the number of reviews very closely match actual number of sales. Sorting those reviews between fact and fiction requires a lot of practice to weed out purchasers who don't know what they are doing, even though they claim to be highly experienced. Newegg also lists the actual number of verified purchases. Here are the Newegg sales numbers for the Zambezi, in sales order.

Zambezi
#1 FX-4100 3.6GHz Quad core 486
#2 FX-8120 3.1GHz Eight core 481
#3 FX-8150 3.6GHz Eight Core 337
#4 FX-6100 3.3GHz Quad core 314
#5 FX-4170 4.2GHz Quad core 44
#6 FX-6200 3.8GHz Quad core 32
That equals 1694 total sales

Sandy Bridge
#1 i5-2500K 3.3GHz Quad core 2016
#2 i7-2600K 3.4GHz Quad core 1358
#3 i5-2500 3.3GHz Quad core 232
#4 i5-2400 3.1GHz Quad core 204
#5 i7-2600 3.4GHz Quad core 200
#6 i7-2700K 3.5GHz Quad core 146
#7 i5-2300 2.8GHz Quad core 50
#8 i5-2550K 3.4GHz Quad core 34
#9 i5-2405S 2.5GHz Quad core 15
#10 i5-2320 3.0GHz Quad core 13
#11 i5-2400S 2.5GHz Quad core 11
#12 i5-2380P 3.1GHz Quad core 6
#13 i5-2310 2.9GHz Quad core 4
#14 i7-2600S 2.8GHz Quad core 3
#15 i5-2450P 3.2GHz Quad core 2
total 4294

As you can see, after #6, the sandy Bridge pretty much falls off the table in terms of sales numbers. I didn't bother with the Dual cores at all, but there are 13 of them, with 9 showing sales of 50, or less. Cheap Dual cores, most with graphics inferior to the Llano. That's 17 CPUs that total 242 sales, or an average of about 14.2 sales per chip.

The bottom line is that AMD with Zambezi sold right at 40% of what the Sandy bridge Quads sold, with far less overhead, and Sandy Bridge has been out much longer than Zambezi, so there has to be some impact felt, especially since the US is the largest market. I've run my figures by friends that work at Newegg, and while they won't give me the actual numbers, they tell me that I am right in the ballpark. Intel needs to drop a number of the 17 chips that aren't selling, and make some concessions to the dealers that have them in stock, and they need to do it right away because every day they don't just costs Intel more money. The stockholder are not going to like it, but with the biggest sellers, with the i5-2500K and the i7-2600K price dropped to almost no profit, they are going to have to do something, given the failure of Ivy Bridge. Someone at Intel made a bad decision, and the damage is done, and can't be easily undone. There will be a fire sale to lower inventory. There has to be otherwise they won't sell!

Best Regards,
Russ

---

Originally posted by Estuansis:

---

What does paying for keys actually do for me, if using a cracked distro with no need for any key at all works better and passes WGA more cleanly than a legit copy??

---

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

---

You are always better off buying your OS over hacking them.

---

Quote:

---

Movies, that is an interesting idea - I was seriously thinking of a gtx690 once I learned that the sli compatibility issue wouldn't come up.

---

Quote:

---

Running SLi or Crossfire will not give you a big boost in performance as you run the video cards in master/slave configuration which means the second card will only handle about a quarter of the load regardless of having two 16x slots or not.

---

Quote:

---

Keep in mind that OC'n two cards is much more difficult too.

---

Quote:

---

That BF3 was pretty nice with the two cards but I wonder how well it worked with just one of the 7970's, probably close to the same.

---

Originally posted by Wiki:

---

Implementation

SLI allows two, three or four graphics processing units (GPUs) to share the workload when rendering a frame. Ideally, two cards using identical GPUs are installed in a motherboard that contains two PCI-Express slots, set up in a master-slave configuration. Both cards are given the same part of the 3D scene to render, but effectively half of the work load is sent to the slave card through a connector called the SLI Bridge. As an example, the master card works on the top half of the scene while the slave card works on the bottom half. When the slave card is done, it sends its output to the master card, which combines the two images to form one and then outputs the final render to the monitor.

---

Quote:

---

It still would be better getting the fastest card you can for gaming and then down the road when they come down in price getting a second of the same card to improve your performance even more. That would be the path I would go...

---

Originally posted by harvrdguy:

---

But I wouldn't trade my big 30" Dell for anything - it's the best thing Sam ever suckered me into. :)

---