Hi there,

Looking to spend around £800-1000 on a new pc come september,

Am i better off waiting for sandy bridge processors to come q1 2011 or buying a i7 in sept?

Will sandy bridge drop the prices of the i7's significantly?

and finally, will the sandy bridges that are coming in q1 be comparable to the i7's or will they be releasing the higher end sandy bridge's later in 2011?

(relative noob to which processors are good at the moment as been out of the pc buying game for a while)

Thanks in advance.

apparently the i7 920 is an excellent processor for the price ~£230

Intel will first launch mainstream Sandy Bridge processors requiring LGA1155 socket boards, and you can probably compare them with i5s/i7s of LGA1156 socket.

The enthusiast or high end processors will be launched in sometime 2011.

Right now I am unsure anyone have put out any data with regard to pricing of new platform / processors; so it is bit difficult question to answer whether that will drop i7s prices significantly.

Looking at your current setup I would advise you to upgrade to an i7 based system this September rather than waiting for Sandy Bridge that will be out sometime at the end of Q1 2011. There might be minor price cuts to the present i7 CPUs but that amount may not be worth the wait. Also, Sandy Bridge is expected to be very expensive. They will probably have an edge in performance over the i7 lineup but should not make a great difference to system performance (depending on use).

If you're looking for a gaming setup, an i7 930 based system with a good GPU (GTX 460, HD 5850) will do very well for quite some time to come. Using Sandy Bridge will in all probability not even benefit gaming in any way.

The P67 chipset (Sandy Bridge CPU) should be introduced into retail at the end of this year.
If you can afford to wait, you can either pick up a P67 based system (your budget is will be more than enough) or pick up a P55 based system which should have lower prices in both retail/etail and the secondhand market compared with todays pricing.
For most applications Sandy Bridge probably wont offer a major leap in performance since the optimizations that the CPU's will have still need software written and available to exploit the faster attributes of Sandy Bridge. As for the motherboards, they will offer the same feature set as second generation P55 boards (USB 3, SATA 6Gb, 1 x PCIe x16 or 2 x PCIe x8 graphics).
I'm guessing that you want the system for general duties (gaming, multimedia etc.), so in that respect there wont be a great deal of difference between either P55 or P67 for the mainstream computer user.

I don't remember where I read it, but someone did mentioned that Sandy Bridge parts will be roughly 10% to 20% faster than the current generation CPUs. However, as DBZ has correctly pointed out, unless there is software optimization to take advantage of features of the new architecture, you may not see much difference.

So IMHO it all comes down to your 'need' / requirement / and availability of 'budget' to decide timing of making this purchase.

cheers for the responses, will be mainly used for gaming so will probably just end up getting an i7 sooner rather than later, time for some research for the other components i think !

Sandy Bridge won't be cheap, so go i7 now IMO. I am.

I don't think so, I think the mainstream prices will remain in roughly the same ranges, however, the higher end parts (LGA 1366) may be bit expensive than the current i7s at the launch, obviously depending upon specs / yields / demand.

@Archean
That is pretty much how the pricing stands to turn out.
Most of what remains on the web is divided into benchmarks + Intels execution/yields, and the non-monopoly+AMDphiles, who would rather not see Intel pillage the wallets of consumers this holiday season (knowing that for many, a system upgrade now would likely preclude a Bulldozer/Llano buy in ~9 months), and the assorted AMD fanboys (and associated mouth-breathers) expounding on how Intel has killed overclocking with SB's (presumeably) late/expensive/underperforming entrance. Considering computing is an ever-changing and evolving technology, there seem to be an awful lot of neophobe "enthusiasts" (witness: ATi brand, replacement of).

Hey DBZ

I agree with your assertion about 'fanboism' about one brand or another.

Thankyou for the link. I think at these price points even the higher priced i7 2600 part seems pretty damn good deal to me. By the way, I was thinking about upgrading my system to i7 950 in next few months, as it too seems like a very good deal, but this is making me reconsider and perhaps wait for some time and see how things turn out.

It should be quite an affordable system upgrade for the mainstream. I would think that a reasonably well equipped motherboard should be no more expensive than a H57/H55/P55. It should be quite popular with the mATX crowd.

Well I don't like mATX boards frankly, they limit your options in some areas. I am more interested in full ATX boards, will see what options are available and how things turn out.

My thinking was more along the lines of the HTPC user, who might only need a TV tuner card and sound card as add-in's.
Personally I would find mATX a little restrictive also, and somewhat costly too in the case of the Rampage Gene and it's like.

Well, Matx is an interesting question. One one hand, it has decent capability, (6 SATA in Intel H57), but you really need to install it in an ATX case anyway, to house all that s***. That said, SLI or Crossfire is out.

Even with H55 you get 5 SATA onboard with one Esata. So that's 3HDDs and 2 opticals in the case, which should satisfy most users. Um, well, you just haven't really saved any space.

Not exclusively...unless you have a harddrive fetish...which could be relatively easily assuaged by converting (in this example) the second 5.25" bay to 3.5" and if necessary adding a powered eSATA bracket

Here you run into what I am going to call, "Mac Mini syndrome". It's cute that the computer is that tiny, but everything that you hook up to it is full size, so it just kind of looks, ( and IMO is), stupid. So, I don't know how Apple convinced people that they were saving space. Jobsian mass hypnosis, I suppose.

I have a couple of Matx machines, (in Matx cases). In one, a Cooler Master "Centurion 541" the hard drives sit on the case floor, there is only provision for two, and from that position, they run hot. Exhaust is done with 2, 80mm fans (noisy). The case is backwards and upside down from ATX convention. (That's not a fault, I'm jus' sayin').

The other is an "Apex" with a 120 mm front fan (as has the Cooler Master), but the intakes are stifled, and wiring really has to be out of the airflow, or the temp can rise rapidly. (Some background on that. I'm a whoosie, so the temp warning is set to 60C, I can't afford to air condition the whole house. So, 60 actually happened when it was 100 hundred degrees outside).

Which leads me to my current dilemma. I have an Antec 900 which houses a P45 ATX board w/ 9500GT video card, and a Cooler Master "Elite 335" housing an H55 Matx board with IGP. I'd like to put the H55 rig in the 900 (for show) and the P45 in the Elite case, but I worry about heat with that choice. Maybe I should start a poll thread on that one. The H55 /Core i3-530 / Win 7 64 bit, more or less eats the P45 / E7300 / XP 32 bit combo for breakfast anyway, even with IGP.

I'll save you the time...
~35% will say it's underpowered and you really need Core i7 980X and X58
~35% will say sell everything and wait for the second coming of Christ (AMD Bulldozer)
~100% of the people in segment and segment 2 will disagree with/throw handbags at the grouping that doesn't show solidarity with their multi-national conglomerate of choice.
~10% will tell you that changing the chassis won't improve your Crysis bench score
~10% will post a reply completely constructed of text speak and smilies that has no bearing at all on the question
~8% (+ at least 50% of posters in segments 1, 2, 3 and 4) will attempt to hijack the thread to talk about a super-quad-octocore system they "are thinking of building"
~1.5% will hijack the hijacked thread.
~0.5% will post to tell you that if Kevin Kolb goes down, the Iggles season rests on the noodle-armed Mike Vick.

I'll put that on my wish list at Newegg and put their names on file. My birthday is in December, fancy that.
About the box artwork on that, will Jesus be driving, or will he be on a cross as the hood ornament....?
The handbag thing, is that why insulting people on the internet is called, "flaming"...?
Even if you're right, but you're still stating the patently obvious, would it be still fair to consider this particular group imbeciles...?
Tru dat...!
OK, here the demographic of the responses changes from handbags to windbags.
At this point I'll be too disgusted to care.
I knew you'd help me make this decision.

I can't help but state the obvious ............ this thread has been hijacked !!!