Re: [gentoo-user] core i5

[Mark Knecht]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 2:56 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger <lists@×××××.at> wrote:
>
> again ... I consider buying a new box for work.
>
> currently I am still quite happy with my core2duo E6600 with 8 gigs of
> ram, running ~amd64 ... running fine.
>
> but I remember the huge step back then from the pentium 4 ...
>
> Will it be the same when I go for a core i5?
>
> I use that box for virtualization as well (vmware and kvm), so maybe it
> would also help to not only change cpu but also add 2 cores (going
> quadcore).
>
> I just want to hit the sweet spot if that's possible.
>
> And I'd like to hear any pros and cons if you would like to share.
>
> Thanks, Stefan
>

I'm writing you from an Intel Core i5-661 Clarksdale machine using the
built in graphics. I've been fairly impressed with the processor
itself, not very impressed with the stock cooling they supplied, and
in general find the graphics at least acceptable for my needs as a
desktop machine.

The i5-661 cores are actually the fastest cores I have, and I've also
got an i7-920 and an i7-980x. The i5-661 is only 2 cores/4 threads,
but the cores are clocked at a higher rate than the other machine and
on simple non-multi-threaded apps outperform the other machines.
However when I'm running something compute intensive I've had the
machine over heat using stock cooling so get a good CPU fan. (Yeah,
the i7-980x is pretty nice also as it has 12 threads to play with and
builds KDE from source in a little over an hour.)

This machine has 3 old hard drives in it as well as 2 sound cards and
a 1394 card and along with the two LCD monitors it still draws only
about 150W so I'm pretty happy with the cost of running it day to day.

I've not used it at all for Myth since I moved mostly to DirecTV but I
suspect it wouldn't do badly assuming there's no issues with the Intel
Graphics driver. I cannot help you there.

Cheers,
Mark