Nope - Ivy Bridge is not going to run on the PCH chipset, he will need to buy a completely new mobo for ivybridge.
Also a 1155 will be only quads, which is the entry level chip for ivybridge I believe (same socket 1155, but like said not using the Cougar point PCH chipset so it wont work) and the 1356 will replace the 1366 for mid range 6 cores - upper mid range 8 cores, while LGA2011 is for upper end 8 cores which will take the same market slot the 1366 (gulftown 980x) is currently in until 2012.

Basically everything will be reshufled at the end of 2011, so like said he will be left in the dust in a years time, its much better for him to save $ buy a mobo that runs a 40nm low end i7 and wait until the dust settles in early 2012 and then make a purchasing decision. This is the second major/BIG transition into multicore cpus and we will see low end pcs all with quads while a gaming pc will be 6-8 core in a years time.

This is what I find a bit funny about the PC market, because I very much doubt there will be a single game that is optimized for six or eight cores before (at the earliest) 2013.
I'm willing to bet quad cores will still be the real world standard until then. Developers are not going to develop games for six or eight cores as it will be isolating 80% of the market.

Nobody is making uber game engines for PC right now, largely because of economics...even Crysis, Crysis 2 and Metro 2033 run perfectly well on a dual core on maximum settings.
So while it's nice to be able to boast a fast quad or hex core CPU, for 90% of games out there it's overkill, imo.

I'm willing to bet the same will apply to six and eight core cpu's in the foreseeable future.

Dont overestimate hyperthreading...you have 8 threads, but it isnt like having 8 cores...it is a little bit faster...but the real purpose of hyperthreading is more programs can run at the same time...there is no point in optimising a game for 8 threads...no gain

Generally the only advantage is tripple channel Ram...THATS IT. Buy i5...best bucks for power in flight simulators especially because of better or same overclock.

So I would have to get a new motherboard to run Ivy bridge? I'm having a hard enough time deciding on mobo already, any recommendations to get me started? Was looking at MSI because of the one touch OC, also Asus p8p67 Deluxe! Thank you

gotta go to work check back later

I´d personally take the ASUS mobo but thats just because I have no good experience with the latest (so called military grade component) MSI mobo I bought. MSI forums are filled with people with boot probs and the moment I tried to install a somewhat better cooler on mine it just went poof after having it less then a week. It is that I paid for it but otherwise I would switch to ASUS in an instant.

One touch OC is utter marketing bullshit, if you really want to overclock you should do it in the BIOS anyway.

Uhh lol - dont know what universe you are from. I have metro and I cant even max it out without bad fps slowdown in some places. Crysis and crysis 2 are old tech, bad choice.

BFBC2 uses 8 threads btw, WOP uses 4, BF3 will require a quad probably, so I dont know where you are getting this info from. Mulithreading is slow in uptake because its hard for programmers to learn, its biggest advantage was with DX11, but thats not used because so many games are made as cross platformers now.

But please dont give out misinformation, I get your point, you dont need a 6 or 8 core right now. 4 threads is fine, but in a year it will be limiting your pc badly, in 2 years = disaster.

Already if you look at tri sli 580s they are limied by mobo and cpu for example.

ANyway I am exhausted from writing a paper - OP dont listen to tech advice here, I can tell you from a years experience you wont get very good advice. Go to tomshardware and post there or another good pc/oc forum. This is not the place.

Yes because you have plenty of experience with this stuff to base your opinion on? 8 threads = alot better than 4 threads/cores. Your cpu has to sit and wait for your ram, in the meantime if you have an i7 it will be far more active/productive.

considering that the op only plays il2 1946, rof, lockon and now cod i hardly think he has to worry about getting a cpu with six or eight cores or fancy threading capability, for now or in the forseeable future.

in view of his limited game selection i think he cant go wrong with a I5 2500K.

I apologise about Metro...you're right, I was a bit optimistic about 'maximum' settings...but high settings is easily possible on a dual core, no question.

I dunno...maybe you and I simply have different perspectives on what constitutes running a game well. I honestly can't see that in two years owning a fast quad core would lead to a disasterous gaming experience. (That's how I'm reading your post, but please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Tri sli? How many people have money to afford setups like that? It's not indicative of the average gaming rig.

Anyways, it's all swings and roundabouts at the end of the day. One way or another, we'll all have to upgrade sooner or later.

2500k is the best value for money you can buy for a gaming rig these days period.

While I fully understand people with a 2600k like to stress the fact it supports hyperthreading this feature is absolutely irrelevant for gaming, since no game supports it or will likely support it in the forseeable future.

HT is nice if you like to run several apps at the same time, what it does is basically split up a single processor so it can run two or more threads in parrallel. Gaming fully stresses (or should stress if it is properly optimized) all cores so hyperthreading would be kinda useless anyway.

Here´s a further explanation I took off another forum:

Hyperthreading is Intel's copyrighted term for Symmetric Multi Threading (there's something you can Google for and get good information). Symmetric multithreading is different than symmetric multiprocessing (multiple processors) for several reasons:

1. It's one processor that can process multiple threads at once, not actually two processors.

2. Since it's one processor, the two (or more) threads running share certain registers, L1 and L2 cache availability, etc.

3. Because they must share, there can be contention between the two parallel threads and so they must be scheduled (by the OS and by the processor prefetch logic) in an efficient manner.

Intel's hyperthreading has nothing to do with LONG pipelines, it instead has everything to do with multiple execution units in the processor itself. The P4 chips have seperate FPU, Integer, SSE, and SSE2 execution engines inside the core. Before Intel started using HT, only one of those execution engines could run at a time.

Thus, if an FPU instruction came through the pipes, the integer, SSE and SSE2 units were all inactive and just sat there waiting. With Intel's Hyperthreading, they now can allow two of those execution engines to run simultaneously. That doesn't DOUBLE your output, but it does increase it by a noticeable amount if you have unlike instructions that can be run parallel.

So for example, if you have multiple FPU instructions all streamed together, HT isn't going to help at all. If you have a mix of FPU, Integer and SSE that all needs to compute and the instructions are not dependant on eachother, they can be processed in parallel and can rip through them faster.

The absolute best case scenario is something like a 65% increase in processing ability because of cache coherency and branch prediction issues (so it never can actually double). Many multithreaded apps can see a 15-30% increase, basically all others see an average of zero

There are several older applications that will slow down when hyperthreading is enabled, mostly old multithreaded apps that were never actually meant to run in an SMT environment. These apps break off worker threads that are all interdependant of eachother, and often that scenario can make a Hyperthreaded processor stall out even worse than a normal processor would.

These apps are few and far between, and an SMT-aware operating system (Windows XP) can be forced to limit those threads to a single virtual processor in order to keep them from misbehaving and slowing down.

Both AMD and IBM are reportedly looking at SMT options as well, because most modern microprocessors have multiple execution engines that are (quite often) idling. Again, it has nothing to do with total pipeline length, it has only to do with the total number of seperate execution engines on the CPU core.



Basically, if you use heavy video programs or Photoshop (especially running them at the same time) HT would make a difference, for gaming, not so much.