Anyone have an Ivy build on Z77 scheduled ?

I prefer to be compulsive about my builds.

In regards to what? HTPC's? Not much. But as performance goes in general yes. Not huge if you already are on 1155. But they should OC pretty good.

Acually, early reports indicate that it won't overclock as well as current chips until you get to sub-zero cooling due to poor voltage scaling. It will be pretty good for HTPC computers due to a 20% reduction in power. I personally think it's overkill and would rather wait for the next generation of ARM or Brazos chips but anybody who likes Sandy Bridge will find Ivy Bridge suitable.

Ok, I did see some mention of that but thought it was just rumors.

Me too

At least your honest about it.

Never know when I'm gonna fire up the Egg and listen to the wife *itch about it . Hell it's almost worth the money just to see how long she can yammer on about it

However , no .... no new 77 build here either .

As expected Intel has some of the documentation on line now but some of the links produce "page not found".

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...html?wapkw=z75

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/...html?wapkw=z77

Newegg is selling Z77/75 MBs, 29 of them.

AND the least expensive one STILL has TWO Legacy PCI slots, courtesy of Biostar adding a PCIe-to-PCI bridge chip.

No, you should not. The i3 versions of the CPU won't be available until Dec 2012.

No reason to buy a motherboard and have to rebuy a CPU in 8 months.

And the energy savings is a legitimate reason to choose Ivy if this was Dec 2012. But other wise you are talking potentially a max of 20% improvement over the Sandy which is only about 6-8 watts.

So that's not a good enough reason to upgrade from Sandy to Ivy, imo. It would take decades to recoup that cost in energy savings.

So yes to waiting if you want to wait until December or 2013 for a new build. No to upgrading from a Sandy to Ivy just for the heck of it.

That's how I view it.

Some of the internet rumours I read said that Intel is trying to flush some of the inventory of existing 32 nm Sandy Bridge parts.

Perhaps the upcoming intro of the Ivy Bridge CPUs will drop prices of the existing SB CPUs and 6x series MBs.

Or at least about my "planning" which often gets a ways ahead of my building. I'm figuring a Intel DH77DF ITX motherboard with an i5-3550S will be a great foundation for a small desktop pc.

Intel is not really known to drop prices on previous cpu's when they release new ones. Maybe a tiny bit but not much at all.

I think that at least on the last two rounds, the new versions have actually been and remained cheaper than their predecessors for comparable performance.

Micro Center ftw.

Cpu's are in store only. They sell them at cost or even a loss sometimes(according to previous employees).

They do it to get you in the store to hopefully buy other stuff. The other day with a coupon I got an Intel 530 for $22.

Where did you get the coupon?

Not sure if it still works but its $15 off anything. You could get an item for $14.99 for free. There is no minimum. Anyways may be expired but you enter your email in one of the bottom rows.

https://email.microcentermedia.com/P...EyNjA5OTI2NQU=

Thanks for the info. However the coupon has expired. I am on their email list & either I missed it or did not get it.

I contacted Micro Center via their "Contact Us" on their website. I politely explained the situation & was concerned that I might not be getting any other coupons either. I waited a few days & contacted them again. They replied & said never got my first message. So I replied & re-explained the situation, which was yesterday.

Maybe they'll make me an offer. If not I'll talk them in person when I go there.

Im in the process of putting together a new HTPC and I was looking at this mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157293

The reason I went with Z77 board was the availability of more SATAIII connectors (4) and more USB 3.0 plugins (4). As a movie server the need for fast transfer speeds is critical, and having more than 4 internal drives is important as well. This board also has a PCIe 3.0 connection. These features make me less worried about future upgradability as well.

Dumb question but --- does Ivy fix 23.976hz playback?

Fast transfer speeds? If you are talking about playback SataII is more than enough. Same with transferring files. A mechanical drive can't saturate SataII let alone SataIII.