I've always liked AMD, but it's been some years since they did something "great". And not only on the CPU part eh. They really need to wake up to stop the bullshit from Intel and nVidia.

The PII 965 BE in my desktop PC certainly agrees with you.

It helps that the Phenom 2 has a 700mhz clock advantage. :)
Otherwise IPC is lower/equivalant to the later model Core 2 Quads.

With that said, overclocking the NB clock can allow a Phenom 2 to switch into another gear, they're so enjoyable to play with.
I still find more joy overclocking and tweaking my AMD rigs over my socket 2011 system which essentially was set-and-forget.

I thought overclocking was already limited to Z only boards? Wasn't that how it was on IB?

I just wish you could OC with all CPUs. I just picked up an Asrock X79 Extreme6 along with a Xeon E5-2665 ES SB-EP CPU. It would be nice to crank up the speed, although having 8 cores/16 threads is handy.

Overclocking was alwas associated with "Z" boards. However with Haswell Intel screwed up the Bios and allowed for all boards to overclock...equally. Benchmarking folks are getting same results with a 80 dollar "H" board as with a 200 dollar "overclocking optimized Z" boards.

The issue is that Intel is going to patch these boards so if you are currently overclocking, you will get a security update through Windows Update. IMO they can freely patch the existing baords before they ship a new batch but updating the boards already sold is rotten.

Otherwise, what are you using the Xeon for, out of curiosity?

Oh, okay. I had just assumed that it was only for Z again like with IB. Taking out support for it after the fact though is pretty bad.

Not too much at the moment, it's just become my main system. Like I said it is an ES (Engineering Sample), so on this one can't clock as high as the later released CPU. Up to 2.5ghz using 7-8 cores compared to the standard one which clocks up to 2.8ghz using 7-8 cores. Motherboard compatibility is also an issue, which is which is why I went with the Asrock X79 board as they have good compatibility with Xeon E5 cpus.

Since it is an ES CPU it was pretty cheap though, I paid about $300 for the CPU and picked up the mobo used for about $130, so it was a pretty cheap upgrade, especially after selling my IB Xeon E3 CPU and Z77 mobo. The IB Xeon E3 was 4core/4threads so this 8core/16thread Xeon E5 is a nice upgrade for cheap. 20mb L3 cache as well!

I've seen a pretty good deal on an Asrock X79 Extreme4-M matx board so I might pick that up for my matx case and use this CPU in there as my server box if I ca find a good deal on another ES CPU, possibly when IB-E stuff releases.

Well that's a devious practice.

Also, on a tangent, isn't Broadwell planned to be embedded-only in all boards? I've heard nothing but negative feedback from this. Anyone think AMD can take advantage of Intel's bad rap?

Solid-Stark said: Well that's a devious practice. Also, on a tangent, isn't Broadwell planned to be embedded-only in all boards? I've heard nothing but negative feedback from this. Anyone think AMD can take advantage of Intel's bad rap?

Nah. "Broadwell-D" is planned for socket 1150. (The same socket as Haswell.)
Broadwell-H, Broadwell-U and Broadwell-Y (ITX, Ultrabook and Tablets) will drop any and all sockets.
Broadwell-M will use a PGA socket for higher-end Laptops.

That's been the plan from Intel anyway and follows it's tic-toc strategy, however "rumours" (Aka, stuff you shouldn't take as gospel/truth)
point towards a Haswell Refresh for 2014 instead of Broadwell with Skylake still on track for 2015.

So basically, I shouldn't buy a laptop with an Intel core right now if I want to use it for games? Not even the ones out right now as they'll get patched later?

Yes...but only out of principle. You really can't overclock laptops so this patch will not affect you even if you buy Intel. :)