Intel Ivy Bridge Extreme processors details

[Grauniad]

The next generation of the Ivy Bridge Extreme (IVB-E) processors is due to announce in September and some reviews and pricing details are starting to leak out.

Here's Anandtech and Toms' Hardware.

If you want to build a PC that's all about fast I/I, then this is where it's at. Pricing  is not in the range of ordinary gaming PCs, I doubt you'd get away with anything under $2,000, but you'll get a lot for that extra dollars.

- Rated for faster 1866 memory
- 8 extra PCI-e 3.0 lanes
- double the memory bandwidth with 4-channel (as opposed to dual-channel) memory.

The low-end i7-4820K is rumored to price lower than the  i7-4770K and eventhe  i7-3770K. This is good news, since when I was building, I could not make a case for using an i7-3820 in a build.

Now it will make a compelling case for the CPU in a very I/O intensive, fast gaming computer good for video capture at a very attractive price point.

Having used an SSD as my primary boot drive for a while now, I'm starting to thing that while it's nice to boot up fast, it isn't really yhe best use of SSDs in serious PCs that need to do work like capturing video.

If I have to build a PC that's suitable for gaming, and also for maybe building games and capturing video and post-processing video, this is what I might consider doing.

Put in a very large 4TB hard drive with a 60 or 120 MB SSD for a cache. The Intel Smart Storage will (after 3 times of use) cache the most-frequently used data on the SSD, delivering fast speed to the most-used data while adapting to changing use patterns over time and still presenting a single-drive appearance to the user.

Based on money, this PC can have quad-channel RAM and I'll put either 32 GB (4x8GB) or 64 GB (8 x 8GB) memory in it. This will be in the range of $250-$500.

For extra performance boost, I'll consider adding a small, 32GB SSD to use as a dedicated I/O device for paging, and one or two large (120 or 240 GB) SSDs that can be work drives. My thinking here is I can use these as target devices for compiles, video capture, etc.  No permanent data. When they wear out after a few years of hard use, no problem, just replace them with a new one. No impact to my important data.

Over the course of the next month or so, I may start pricing a PC like this. Building it? Well, if I were to do it, I'll be looking at doing it come the November Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.