- Please be aware this guide is currently undergoing maintenance -
Bloomfield
- That's what you're looking at. Make sure you get a motherboard and memory to match!! So you want a big shiney computer with uber everything?? You better have a deep wallet :D
The i7 920/930 are good enough for pretty much anything, if you want more (and have a very large budget) you just choose a more expensive one! All these except the hexacore one have 4 cores that can run 2 threads each. The hexacore, as the name suggests, has 6 that run 2 threads each. A thread is a job given to the processor by the computer.
Intel Core i7
Intel Core i7 is pretty much the pinnacle of desktop computing at them moment, I won't go into the details because I'm sure a hundred people have already written down all the amazing things about it, the only thing I will point out is that we are looking at the LGA1366 version of this for uber shiney!
If you don't want to read lots of reviews then choose yourself a middle of the price band board from Asus or Gigabyte. MAKE SURE ITS 1366!
Motherboards
We're talking system memory i.e. RAM, hard drives and such I will refer to as
STORAGE.
MAKE SURE YOU GET TRIPLE CHANNEL DDR3!!!! Bloomfield uses DDR3 only! DDR3 refers to the interface between the Motherboard and the Memory, in that it's the 3rd iteration of desktop memory, not that it's 3 times as fast.
Triple channel kits will contain 3 sticks of RAM (Memory) and without at least 3 identical sticks of memory your kit will underperform. The speeds are obvious, faster is better, 1333/1600/1800+ measured in MHz
1333
1600
1800+
Main differences between Core i7 Bloomfield (1366) and Lynnfield (1156):
The connections between the Processor and Motherboard, this is where the numbers come from. Bloomfield is Triple Channel, that's that the processor has 3 "pipes" to the RAM rather than the 2 Channels of Lynnfield. This is only really noticeable if you are running complex programs that use a lot of memory bandwidth.
If in doubt, ASK someone, we're here to help!