ONE
MORE
TIME!
H
ere it is, Issue 42 of TheOverclocker Magazine.
Usually I’d go on about some half relevant aspect
of the industry or whatever, or talk about what I
believe to be “exciting”. I may still do that, but first I need
to give you all a heads up, that this may possibly be the last
issue of TheOverclocker Magazine.
Can’t confirm that at present, but what I’m saying is don’t
be surprised if there is never another issue after this one. If
there is great, but if not, consider this a goodbye and good
luck. There’s nothing more to write about it really, you have
been warned. It’s been a good ride, but it’s at a point where I
or the publication itself needs a change. It’s been crazy to
say the least, running and pushing out the magazine time
and time again at random intervals. No need to recall all of
that as the old issues are still available. From the boring
and uninspired ones to the good ones, they all had a story,
challenges and joys.
With all that said, if you’ll see Issue 43 or not, I can’t say.
I’d hope you’re able to, but if not, this is thanking you for all
the support, readers, emails etc. They were appreciated
and will continue to be.
Now on to more important things. No question we’ve all
seen or have some idea of how INTEL’s 18
Core Extreme Edition CPU is shaping up. At the very
least you’ve seen some 16 core results. Given that there
was some controversy surrounding the capacity of some
motherboards to provide enough power to CPUs. It is
natural to infer from that that higher core count CPUs may
potentially worsen the situation (if there is a situation at all
right?). It makes sense that we may in fact get some second
generation boards, a do over of sorts for all the vendors.
So they may all provide X299 boards with the ability to
handle the 7960 and 7980X CPUs from Intel.
The question then I suppose for potential buyers is, if they
should buy now or wait for this wave of “2nd generation
boards”? Mind you this is only speculation and there’s no
reason to suspect there will be such. However, I do suspect
that X299 may be with us for a little while longer, so it’s
not unreasonable to say that we may see a refresh on this
same platform CPU side as well. Whatever next generation
CPUs replace Skylake-X will likely be a good time for board
vendors to refresh their boards anyway.
As such, it would not be unexpected to end up with a 2nd
generation of X299 boards anyway. It’ll come either way, be
it for 16 and 18-Core support, or largely due to the passage
of time. So, back to the question then, 'does one upgrade
right now or wait?' Answering that question seems to be a
little more complicated than I initially thought as it's entirely
based on what it is you are doing or planning on doing.
We’ve seen X399, but I suspect for the majority of
competitive overclockers it holds little to no interest given
its limitations. For “regular” users, it does make sense
perhaps, at least for “mega-tasking” or whatever they refer
to it as. From my perspective, I do suspect both platforms
will have their audiences, which find particular advantages
they need within each ecosystem. For extreme
overclocking though, it’s not quite there yet.
With CoffeLake in the mix as well, it’ll be a time of plenty
of choice and even fewer clear answers. I’m personally
looking forward to it, even though I’ll be the first to admit
that I don’t’ actually need that number of cores. I rarely do
anything that requires so many logical cores. That it’s
newer or updated technology though still excites me and for
that purpose alone, I’d certainly consider an upgrade to any
of these multi core CPUs we have, particularly for X299.
Either way, plenty to see over the next 12 months and for
the most part, it looks exciting, giving us some reprieve
from all new RGB things. Until er… yeah, Take care .
[ Neo Sibeko - Editor ]
Issue 42 | 2017 The OverClocker 3