Core i5-2500k first impressions

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Apr 25, 2011, at 6:52 PM, Rich Braun wrote:

> Jarod Wilson <jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> observed:
>> I think you're failing to comprehend some of what it is that you
>> actually get from "enterprise" distros.
> 
> Indeed, you're right.  Having been a long-time user of a couple of them, and
> no longer am--I never quite agreed with their value proposition.
> 
>> Such as, backported support
>> for new hardware. Which the vendors of said "enterprise" distros
>> have access to long before you do.
> 
> I'm sure they do.  But getting it out of their labs and into yours is often a
> huge hassle.

I'm not quite clear, who is the "their" and the "yours" in the above?


>> /me glances at a socket 1155 Sandy Bridge system that has been in
>> the office for at least 6 months, and runs even RHEL5's latest
>> 2.6.18 kernel just fine.
> 
> The Sandy Bridge will run any old kernel.  Just to make clear the point of
> this discussion thread:  maximizing use of the new hardware with the
> open-source software now coming out.  The two most-popular distros will be
> supporting it in the next few weeks; openSUSE has been supporting it for a
> while; I'll have to leave it to others like yourself to post specific ways to
> get distros like RHEL5 to do so.
> 
> By "supporting it" I don't mean booting up to a root shell prompt.  I mean 3D
> graphics support with HD audio in native mode on dual monitors using the CPU
> and mainboard hardware.

Okay, yeah, you'd probably need RHEL6.1 for that. (I'm a wee bit
server-centric these days, I don't care for Linux on the desktop
very much anymore).


> It's a heckuva lot snappier than my old system whose
> Intel graphics never ran quite right; this new system and software driver came
> up out of the box without any hassles other than the ones I noted, which are
> mainly due to limited hardware vendors' support for XFree86 and (I think) a
> recent direction away from X11 entirely by some in the FOSS community.
> 
> I'm not a gamer but I'll wager this is a super-nice nice gaming platform.

Onboard graphics are never the answer for super-nice gaming platforms,
and most titles these days haven't been cpu-bound for ages, they're
far more gpu-bound. You'll get a lot more gaming performance from adding
a high-end graphics card to a slightly older system than you would by
going to a sandybridge system with onboard graphics. (Of course, optimal
would be the new high-end graphics card *plus* a sandybridge core i7...)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org