Hi guys,
I'll try to keep this as brief as I can, while still giving you the facts. Basically I need some advice before I save towards upgrading my rig (see details on left). I'm currently with Intel and have 4GB of excellent RAM, however my CPU is "only" an E8600 dual core. Since I spend my life hammering multi-threaded downloads and FTP servers, encoding video and running virtual machine servers (all at the same time!), a dual core is limiting me quite a lot at the moment. I wish I'd gone quad to start with; live and learn!
I don't go in for games (unless you count the odd re-run of Half Life 2) so that's not important. With that in mind I was thinking of going back to the dark side (AMD) as an upgrade. The six core (hexacore) Phenom II X6 1055T fares very well in the types of benchmarks I'd be running it for (encoding etc) - matching most of the Core i5 and i7 chips in those fields for a fraction of the price.
It'd be silly to upgrade this s775 Intel rig to a quad now, as even a Q9550 would cost more than a six core AMD and is only about half as fast in encoding benchmarks. I was thinking if I grabbed the AMD I could basically transplant my current Intel mobo and E8600 into my fiancée's PC to give her a much needed speed boost, and end up with six cores of pure win in my own machine.
That's basically two upgrades for ~£250, as AM2+ mobos support DDR2 RAM - meaning I can keep my Reapers. However, despite reading around the net that the Phenom II X6 chips will run on BIOS-updated AM2+ boards, I've been told it's not worth running such a CPU on anything bar an AM3 board with an 800 series chipset with DDR3 RAM.
Can anyone confirm/deny this? I thought half the advantage of AMD (aside from the price/performance trade off compared to Intel) was the fact they rarely change sockets compared to Intel. Or put another way, new chips often tend to be backwards compatible.
If I could grab a decent-ish AM2+ board for about £40 (easily do-able), plug in my existing RAM and drop in a hexacore chip, I'd be in heaven for very little outlay. Does anyone have any experiences/knowledge of these chips yet? I can upgrade either way, but AM2+ is obviously much cheaper... meaning I can upgrade sooner.
Thanks for reading.