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I currently have a P67/2600K rig which has two graphic cards driving three monitors each.
I am in the process of assembling a second rig and the impulsive choice was the Z68. However, I have been wondering whether a P67 with a discrete card might be more appropriate instead of using a Z68 with on-board graphics. There will be no 3-D or GPU based computation and the simplest display which can drive two monitors will work fine.
The system will be overclocked for 24x5 use.
1. Apart from the silicon, one of the principle drivers of stable overclocks is the power delivery system of the motherboard. When you are using the on-board graphics of the Z68, the power to the CPU will have to drive both the CPU and the GPU unit. This is likely to put greater strain on the on the Motherboard power supply and hence perhaps limit the overclock capabilities. Thoughts?
2. Does the onboard-graphic share the L3 cache with the CPU unit? Is that good or bad from the performance perspective vs having a dedicated graphics card? One way to look at it is that on-chip communication between the GPU/CPU should be more efficient than the PCI-e based communication with the discrete card in terms of resource utilization. On the other hand, if the GPU uses the L3 cache also then the performance of the CPU will suffer due to the smaller available L3 cache. What have people observed in real-life usage?
3. The SSD caching is not of significant interest to me since I will be putting a 4 disk RAID and a boot SSD drive to control what goes where.
4. Is there any advantage of using the Z68 versus the P67 if we are going to use a discrete card?
I am in the process of assembling a second rig and the impulsive choice was the Z68. However, I have been wondering whether a P67 with a discrete card might be more appropriate instead of using a Z68 with on-board graphics. There will be no 3-D or GPU based computation and the simplest display which can drive two monitors will work fine.
The system will be overclocked for 24x5 use.
1. Apart from the silicon, one of the principle drivers of stable overclocks is the power delivery system of the motherboard. When you are using the on-board graphics of the Z68, the power to the CPU will have to drive both the CPU and the GPU unit. This is likely to put greater strain on the on the Motherboard power supply and hence perhaps limit the overclock capabilities. Thoughts?
2. Does the onboard-graphic share the L3 cache with the CPU unit? Is that good or bad from the performance perspective vs having a dedicated graphics card? One way to look at it is that on-chip communication between the GPU/CPU should be more efficient than the PCI-e based communication with the discrete card in terms of resource utilization. On the other hand, if the GPU uses the L3 cache also then the performance of the CPU will suffer due to the smaller available L3 cache. What have people observed in real-life usage?
3. The SSD caching is not of significant interest to me since I will be putting a 4 disk RAID and a boot SSD drive to control what goes where.
4. Is there any advantage of using the Z68 versus the P67 if we are going to use a discrete card?
