First question, is the CM 690 II Advanced Black and White actually a good looking case or am I going slightly mad?
Secondly, it worth the extra £10 over the Zalman Z11 Plus, Corsair 200R, Fractal 3000 et al?
It is an amazing case. Sorry about the shipping price
OC3D did a review of it a little ways back. Do a quick search on OC3D.tv if you want to watch.
Hm, are there any technical reasons for this or do they just want you to buy a new board as well?
There are tons of reasons, all based around creating a more efficient architecture. The number of features that have moved from the motherboard to the CPU die have increased fairly rapidly over the last 6 years, which requires different amounts of pins/contacts.
Bumping from the last page, two questions from a friend looking at replacing his old phenom 1/mobo.
1) No issues that I'm aware of.
2) Absolutely no way of knowing. The only evidence we have at hand says no.
Interestingly Toms now recommends Athlon II X4 640 and the Phenom II X4 965 in the entry level, over the Pentium G860 etc...
They specifically mention that the newer games they are testing are using more than two cores. I actually have been wondering what the effect of eight core chips in consoles will have in porting them over to PC. Will PC games two years from now need a six or eight core to operate at a higher level?
Ugh. "Well, games can use more than two cores, so more than two cores = better performance!"
This kind of recommendation without good evidence is really frustrating.
The thing is though, if you buy an AMD processor, then you have also paid for an AMD board. If you buy a pentium, you are set up to put any SB/IB proc on there down the line for killer performance without touching the mobo/RAM. In addition to that, the i3, which is marginally more expensive, eats anything outside of the 8350 for breakfast.
Also, the AMD chips on consoles aren't octo cores. They do have eight cores, but they function as though there were quad cores as they work in pairs.