http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/39751/review/mach_v.html

Looky that price. wow.

Care to elaborate on why Core i7 isn't all that when tested by normal people? I would want to know what everyone thinks about the following:

http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/download/file.php?id=86
http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=135855

Come back later, because I'll update this page once I have something to report. Shouldn't take too long.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15818/15

stilll waiting.... :)

This does not look like a compelling CPU to me.

The board prices, CPU costs, memory cost requirements all are way out of wack for the performance delivered.

I won't deny for a second it's often like this each time a new technology comes and as it matures it becomes more compelling.

None the less it's worth stating, I mean you can pick up an E8500, board, 4gb of decent DDR2 and get that sucker to 4ghz quite comfortably now, it'll thrash the i7 in the vast majority of benchmarks for much much less money.

Eventually the i7 or it's derivatives will be compelling but right now, I see nothing even worth considering throwing my money at :(

I would like to see even faster GPU's though, I recently sold an 8800GT went to a 4870 and it's still not fast enough - it's fast but for gamers, we need a single GPU solution which thoroughly kicks butt.
(Where is the 1920x1200 with AA monster GPU for Crysis? It'll come, one day- but when)

Scott, I have to disagree with:

"This sort of thorny, bandwidth-intensive application benefits greatly from the Core i7's architectural innovations."

Architectual innovations? All they have done is really come up to feature parity with the K8, as far as a point-to-point interconnect, NUMA, and an integrated memory controller? Yeah, there's some other minor tweaks and yeah, Intel has done it BETTER for the current time, but I don't really see that as an architectural innovation, per se.

I'd be more inclined to give kudos to AMD for that, or perhaps to DEC for their EV7 (integrated memory controllers, 12 GBps! and NUMA) and cancelled EV8 (4-thread SMT per core) for being ahead of their time and popularizing the concept among the techies and nerds who lusted after these CPUs back in the late 90's and early 2000's.

got mine today, w00t :) now just waiting on the triple-pack memory...

does anyone know if it's ok to use high speed, 1.9v ddr3 memory (specifically CM3X2048-1600C7DHX) safely with an asus p6t motherboard? it should default to 1.5v and require setting to 1.65 in the bios.

Keeps threatening indeed...

So what exactly happened to those things AMD and Intel were promising to break up threads into more then one and help multi-thread things on the hardware level. I remember reading about plans for them here around the AMD64 and P4D time period.

I dunno - I read the article and I was thoroughly non-plussed, but I am optimistic for the future. Developers have had THREE YEARS to get their proverbial stuff together for multi-core CPUs, going back to the first X2 and the Pentium D. They haven't yet. Hopefully as Intel's compiler technology (or Microsoft's) gets better at spawning multiple, useful threads, that'll change. Right now, it's just more CPU than I know what to do with. Good thing it's out of my price range. :lol:

Geez, it is too bad that you didn't test Supreme Commander. ;)

It is perhaps the most CPU-bounded game to date. I would hope that Nehalem would have be a decent improvement over Core 2.

I am going to bet that Lynnfield is going to be almost as fast at most stuff, while the platform is a lot more affordable.

Hrrm I'd like to see mee some database and webserver (Java/ASP?) benchmarks, in VMs and out. Not that I'd actually know how to interpret them or that I'd want to buy one for those purposes, but I guess that is where all this performance could actually earn some hard (soft?) dollars.

For instance, how would a single socket i7 with tons of RAM match up against a dual socket 8 core machine from AMD?

I guess I'll have to wait for the Xeons :)

Alright Software Developers, GO!

Any chance of getting a download link for the Damage Labs panorama pics?

The folding benchmarks were a nice addition. Although I just skimmed the article I need to read it in full along with the Motherboard article.

Thread summary:

(a) i7 spits on the floor and then wipes it shiny with the competition.

(b) The competition is still capable of wiping the floor shiny on its own time, provided an i7 is unavailable to strawboss.

(c) ...and that's a very good thing, since the i7 will initially be priced as an accessory for an HM Embody chair.

(d) In order to maintain the balance of the forum universe, it is essential to madly debate all of the above anyway.

Carry on!

Makes my 4200+ feel a bit obsolete, and I'm still stuck with the AMD upgrade route :(

Good review. How much difference does the extra 2gb of RAM do though?

This review is the reason I read TR. Best I've seen thus far. That said:

The 45nm Core 2 Quad Q9300 essentially supplanted the Q6600 and found its way into several of our system guide recommended configs during its time. I'm intrigued to see how the Core i7-920's performance and value proposition matches up to these two economical quad-core CPUs.

The Q9400 replaced the Q9300 three months ago, and the Q9300 has been superseded since, as has its Xeon equivalent, the X3320. (The same is true of the Q9450, which was superseded by the Q9550 along with its Xeon equivalent, the X3350.) Also, it's the Q8200 that supplants the Q6600, more or less, and as of Sunday January 18 is widely expected to drop to the Q6600's current price of $183 while the latter will not see a cut, and thus will be effectively superseded until EOL.

Also, no Q9650 or QX9650 against the simulated i7-940? It'd be a clock-for-clock match. (As would the new Q9400 or older superseded Q9450 against the i7-920.)

The results without Hyper-Threading are curious: higher performance in the L1/L2 cache ranges, but lower performance in the L3 range.

Higher contention for the partitioned L2 caches; higher utilization of the L3 cache with SMT on. With SMT off the L2 caches are free for the entire workload but this also means less utilization of the L3 cache due to fewer threads.

In fact, for the average guy, the secret hero of our test results was the Core 2 Duo E8600. If your main reason for wanting a fast computer is to surf the web and play games, you're probably better off getting a fast dual-core like the E8600 than you are picking up a Core i7-920 or any quad-core processor. Game developers keep threatening to really make use of more than two cores, but it just hasn't happened yet.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for this observation! This is the first review I've read with a bit of perspective. For the average PC user the E8600 is, heck, I'll say it, overkill. Get a Pentium Dual-Core E5200 or a Core 2 Duo E7300 and be done with it, really. Core i7 will idle faster than anything else, though. :p

AMD's 45nm quad cores are coming soon. Perhaps they'll have a few surprises in store for us.

Damn it. :p

So when's your super-secret Deneb review out? Deneb is, after all, just around the corner, just like Core i7. I am hoping hard that AMD manages to steal the single-threaded performance crown away from Intel this time; they need it, and so do we, given Core i7's dubious clock-for-clock improvement over Core 2.

Yeah...well how would it stack up against a Northwood P4, 2.6HT processor...clocked at 2.6ghz? Huh.

That's what I thought...

...that I'm living in the past and need an upgrade badly, that's what.

Nehalem is more a server part than a desktop.(like opterons)
Why test games at 1024 x800 or 1280x1024 ? Do you play games at that resolution? No. I play games at 1024 ? No.Who plays games at 1024?

I understand that GPU is pounding the CPU at high rez but still is no problem for, me, if you use the same GPU. Maybe at high rez all the CPUs have the same result. So what? Or Nehalem is like Phenom weak .

The turbo thing was not working or what?

Where are the AMD 45nm benchmarks for comparison? Isn't AMD due to ship 45nm processors this month?? Core i7/Nehalem benchmarks in one form or another have been available for the past 6 months. Has AMD something to hide? Reminds me of those movies that the distributors won't allow the critics to see before public release... for very good reasons. There is a word that describes a traditional Thanksgiving dish that adequately fits here...

What's the story with the L3 clockspeed? The article says 940 and 920 have it running at 2.13Ghz and Anandtech in their article says it's running at 2.66Ghz? Any way to get some confirmation from Intel?

Typo on page 4 in the system summary table:

Core i7-960 2.66 GHz => Should be i7-920, right?
Core i7-940 2.93 GHz

I guess the table is so huge nobody cared to take a second look at it!

Great article, by the way. I really enjoy your writing style, Scott, especially the funny jabs you throw in here and there. (Smackover, eh?)

Edit: Mark-up fail.

Can't find this in the review: Does Core i7 support ECC memory?

Thank you,

(Apologize for using a bugmenot account, I dont have access to my email at the moment).

Buying this chip to put in a desktop PC would be something of a commitment - you're going to have to spend quite a while figuring out what to DO with all those cores :-)

My dual core penryn laptop will do 2-pass H.264 transcodes slightly faster than "real time". So that one of these babies will encode a 2 hour film in about 45 minutes. When you can do that in about as long as it takes you make a good meal, you need something else to do with your hardware.

Did i miss the part that said the avalibility

Any ideas if LGA775 heatsinks will work with these new chips? I see the familiar set of 4 holes at each corner so at least it looks like it will use the same (god forsaken) mounting system.

I want to buy a new heat sink or my E4500. If I knew I'd be able to carry it over to a future I7 build would help me justify getting one of the higher end ones.

Wow, as a non gamer, I'm very excited by this. I still wish TR would have some code compiling benchmarks, especially with GCC.

Scott you'll probably come across this later, but the Extreme doesn't actually have a fully unlocked multiplier... Only the TURBO MODE multiplier can go above 24x. So while OCing is as easy as raising a multiplier (like with Black Edition CPUs and previous EE's), there is still all that TDP/voltage monitoring going on, and overclocking will only go as far as the CPU allows it based on all that.

Shanghai making up the difference? Not likely. We'll have to wait for Bulldozer to see any potential here.

One question that remains: Has Intel now built an insurmountable lead over AMD? Almost seems like it. But one never knows. AMD's 45nm quad cores are coming soon. Perhaps they'll have a few surprises in store for us.

Does TR know something about AMD's 45nm that we don't? Why would they close with such a statement?! That may give some of us budget builders FALSE HOPE.

The Core i7 is an amazing performer, but it may be prudent to wait until the end of Q1 to see better prices. I'm glad the performance won't change when the price does. These things will probably be performance leaders until 2010. Great review TR!

EDIT: WOW! Everybody needs to take a quick look at the Guru3D Multi-GPU Core i7 test in the shortbread: http://www.guru3d.com/article/core-i7-multigpu-sli-crossfire-game-p...
The Core i7 is built to drive multi-gpu configs! If you have a 4870X2 or more then you'll see decent gains with this CPU. I'm really impressed now.