PCMan911's tech blog

Still out to prove I am not an AMD or Intel fan boy I bring in my two Quad core systems.  The first of which will be an AMD.  Right now with a lot of people asking about whether to wait and see if Sandy Bridge will be fixed soon and whether all the problems will truly be fixed, they want alternatives.  The other problem that people get upset about is the constant change of sockets in the Intel side where AMD is a little better at making backwards compatibility.  Already a few motherboard makers have proven you can run older Core i5 series chips in the LGA 1156 on the 6 series chipsets.  Why did Intel change the socket to 1155?  Many people believe it was to force a whole new hardware change.  I for one had not jumped into the Core series because I kept hearing of a socket change.  Intel had already did it once when the came out with the first Core chips that required LGA 1366.  People who jumped onto the X58 chipsets and boards were met with pricey chips and triple channel memory.  For

Currently the Sandy Bridge recalls are in full swing and it looks like March or later before early adopters will be getting fixed chipsets back. I was fortunate enough that someone needed a fairly inexpensive computer and preferred reliability to the latest and greatest.  Socket 775 is vastly still available and at a great value as well. The value machine was going to mainly run office software and surf internet.  Multiple cores are pretty much a given anymore and I would not recommend less than a dual core. Earlier in my blog I also spoke about the difference between the Celeron value chips compared to the more expensive Pentium, now Core 2 and Core series chips.  Intel went and changed things again in the Core 2 and Core series by reintroducing a value chip and calling them Pentium Dual Core.  Now talk about some confusion. The other pretty standard item seemed to be DDR3 instead of DDR2 which was fine because DDR3 prices have fallen.  250GB and larger hard drives are also just w

Now with Sandy Bridge out although many boards are being recalled due to a chipset bug, I have some components that are within 2 generations. The components here are close to one of the latest Socket 775 chipsets and one of the newest dual core models of the Intel Core 2 Duo processors.  Socket 775 was somewhat replaced by Socket 1366 and 1156 and Sandy Bridge uses an all new Socket 1155. Socket 775 was also the last socket that had multiple chipset vendors.  NVidia had several chipsets that ranked above the Intel chipsets.  In graphics if you wanted SLI you needed the NVidia chipset based 775 boards. Socket 775 processors did not have video integrated as well, it was still on the chipset. System Components: CPU  Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3Ghz, 2 Cores/2 Threads (Dual Core), 6MB Cache, 1333Mhz Rated FSB Socket 775, Wolfdale 45nm, Stepping A, Revision E0, Multiplier 9x, FSB-333Mhz MMX, SSE 1,2,3,3S,4.1, EM64T, VT-X Board  OEM (Dell) Intel Q45 / 82801JD (ICH10), Socket 775 2 * SA