Hazaro said:
Here's what I think went down.
Delay delay delay, troubles happened, they NEEDED to launch a product. Cranked the shit outta voltage and upped the speed to be near competitive.
There is no way the designed the chips to consume 90W more than their competitor, they aren't nVidia.
It is indeed designed to consume a lot more power, simply because it's still on a 32nm process. Until Global Foundries can get a handle on smaller sizes, power consumption is going to be high. For a desktop part though, it's not that big of a deal.
Looks like no one got a chance to test the water cooler thing in time for publishing.
One site mentioned it would be about $100. I lold.
The price advantage is absolutely gone if you do that.
I'll wait for anandtech's review (and until shit goes on sale) before making a final decision. I still believe BD is great for what it's designed to do, but I'll probably get whatever the 2600K (no I'm not waiting for E or IvyBridge). Of course this means a more expensive CPU, and a bit more expensive motherboard, but it's not that big of a difference if you factor in the $100 for the water cooler shit (because let's face it - if I go with the Bulldozer I'm going to get that).
Got my case, PSU, and RAM today, and it's ready for a CPU and mobo (and the SSDs and blu ray drive, but they should be here tomorrow - first time Amazon Prime failed to 2-day me).
It's basically a question of whether or not I really plan to stream while gaming.
I'm definitely in the group that benefits from plenty of multi-threaded performance. I run daily, full-system, encrypted backups at 6PM when I get home (prime gaming hours) I encode, I would like to stream but probably not regularly, and I skype video chat/google+ hangout while playing with friends. But a 2600K just has better performance during less crowded workloads (which is > 50% of the time).
Have any of these sites said when Bulldozer (and the water cooler) would be available to buy? If it's really $240 + $100, and it's not available to buy within the next 26 hours, then I'm almost certainly going for a 2600K.
Bulldozer is still the clear winner for truly multi-threaded use, but if there's no driver / scheduler update for Windows 7 a good chunk of that performance is lost (as shown in all of the reviews) when related threads cross modules (preventing idling and turbo core speed ups, as well as fucking over cache). Haven't seen any of the reviews really mention any upcoming improvements though, (we did have that blurb about the Linux kernel patch). I'm hoping Anandtech covers this (and the watercooler) in more depth.