Nehalem and gaming

[CallMeTheStig]

It's been 4 years since I've upgraded my PC, and penryn is very tempting to me, especially the new quadcores with the 1333mhz fsb. But I have been doing a lot of reading about Nehalem and it's supposed to be the biggest change in architecture since the Pentium back in 1995. The only two things I really do on my PC are play games and do shcool work (word, excel, internet), so all I really care about performance wise is gaming.

I've heard a lot of people saying that today's CPUs are much too fast for today's GPUs and that it's very unlikely that the CPU is ever a bottleneck for games. With this in mind, would Nehalem really be worth the wait for gaming? I realize that newer, better graphics cards will be out by then, but I've heard that the bandwidth of PCI-e hasn't even been close to being reached, let alone PCI-e 2.0.

If I get a penryn motherboard with PCI-e 2.0, penryn cpu, and 8800gt in January, will I be left behind when Nehalem comes out in the beginning of 2009, or will a few upgrades be adaquate? (ie: upgrade graphics the card). I realize that everything becomes outdated quickly in this industry, I just don't want to upgrade a year before some huge technological revollution. Like I said, all I really care about is gaming performance. Anyway, thanks in advance!

 

[Pilot53]

Three letters, FSX

 

[aguire]

I realize that everything becomes outdated quickly in this industry, I just don't want to upgrade a year before some huge technological revollution. Like I said, all I really care about is gaming performance. Anyway, thanks in advance!

I think you've answered your own question on whether you should wait or not.There's no point in waiting in this industry.The next best thing is always around the corner.

Whether or not Nehalem will be as great as Intel says it will be, noone can answer that yet since there's nothing concrete.I hope the great technological inovation is not just the integrated memory controller, because AMD has been doing that for years.

Nehalem will be "truly" quad-core, if you agree with AMD fans that today's Intel processors are not quad-cores but just 2 dual-cores, and for the first time for Intel processors with an integrated memory controller.The point is are you really going to notice such a huge performance increase in real-life tasks, and not just benchmarks with Nehalem?

I think you'll be fine with a Q6600.Keep in mind that when Nehalem will first come out, it will be quite expensive and you'll have to wait for prices to come down to reasonable levels first.So, you'll have to wait for more than a year.

 

[CallMeTheStig]

I think you've answered your own question on whether you should wait or not.There's no point in waiting in this industry.The next best thing is always around the corner.

Whether or not Nehalem will be as great as Intel says it will be, noone can answer that yet since there's nothing concrete.I hope the great technological inovation is not just the integrated memory controller, because AMD has been doing that for years.

Nehalem will be "truly" quad-core, if you agree with AMD fans that today's Intel processors are not quad-cores but just 2 dual-cores, and for the first time for Intel processors with an integrated memory controller.The point is are you really going to notice such a huge performance increase in real-life tasks, and not just benchmarks with Nehalem?

I think you'll be fine with a Q6600.Keep in mind that when Nehalem will first come out, it will be quite expensive and you'll have to wait for prices to come down to reasonable levels first.So, you'll have to wait for more than a year.

ah very good answer, thanks.

A second question I have is about gaming and the CPU.
Is it true that games today are much much much more GPU intensive and hardly come close to the capacity of the CPU?
I'm just curious what the major bottleneck is for gaming these days.

And for Pilot, what's FSX?

 

[socK]

the latest flight sim

it apparently scales to 256+ cores.

 

[Manny Calavera]

I think you've answered your own question on whether you should wait or not.There's no point in waiting in this industry.The next best thing is always around the corner.

Whether or not Nehalem will be as great as Intel says it will be, noone can answer that yet since there's nothing concrete.I hope the great technological inovation is not just the integrated memory controller, because AMD has been doing that for years.

Nehalem will be "truly" quad-core, if you agree with AMD fans that today's Intel processors are not quad-cores but just 2 dual-cores, and for the first time for Intel processors with an integrated memory controller.The point is are you really going to notice such a huge performance increase in real-life tasks, and not just benchmarks with Nehalem?

I think you'll be fine with a Q6600.Keep in mind that when Nehalem will first come out, it will be quite expensive and you'll have to wait for prices to come down to reasonable levels first.So, you'll have to wait for more than a year.

Other then the XE procs,I doubt Nehalem will be pricy,it'll likely be cheap,as cheap as Penryn will be come Jan 08.

 

[aguire]

Other then the XE procs,I doubt Nehalem will be pricy,it'll likely be cheap,as cheap as Penryn will be come Jan 08.

It's only worth waiting for penryn, since it will start shipping in about two months and it will be the first 45nm processor(cooler, less energy consumption).As a consumer i hope so, but i just don't think so.I hope i'm wrong and you are right.In any case, i still think people getting a Q6600 today will be more than fine for the next 2-3 years.

And CallMeTheStig, get plenty of RAM.2 GBs is the new standard, especially with the price of RAM these days.4 GBs, if you can afford it, wouldn't hurt either.Especially if you intend to run Vista.Which since you are a gamer you would want to, at least at some point, for DX10/10.1.

And for gaming a good GPU is probably more important than the processor these days.But i'm not a hardcore gamer, so probably someone else could answer that for sure.Look at what's going on with the 8800GT.It's selling like crazy.