Hi,
I'm afraid i have to read the review again !
As a french speaking person, i'm confused about some demonstration.

I just recieved the P6T WS Professional, decided for the Intel Core i7-965, but i'm puzzled about the amount of memories.

Actually, i will buy DDR3 1600MHz, but because my experience tell me to full always all slots for best performances, (even all at 1GB) i wonder if the 6 x 1GB will be the best solution...?

I also ordered the GeForce FX5800 (with a DisplyPort) compatible with the bright new EIZO CG242W monitor (one DisplyPort, and only one DVI).

I will use 2 velociRaptor HDD's and 2 SAS drives (RAID)

This system will be used for Industrial Vision Systems Integration, and it have to be fast !
Regards,
Jean

Hehehe, I loved this line: "for those folks rolling their own Core i7 systems..."

I thought you wern't supposed to let the magic smoke escape ;)

I'm disappointed to see the gaming benchmarks are intentionally bottlenecked. While I like the thought behind the approach, I would really be more interested to see how games actually interact with RAM speed on a fundamental level.

The intentionally bottlenecked benchmarks is stating the obvious. I think most people -- especially TR readers -- are smart enough to realize that. Give us the chance to THINK for ourselves, please?

Real-world resolution and settings game tests. Thank you for including those!

Would be interesting if you could also confirm whether or not 6GB RAM provides significant advantage over 3GB RAM as some manufacturers are claiming. Great job here very illuminating, makes Core i7 seem much more appealing to those on a budget.

A great read as always! Really happy to see some real world game resolutions included, as for me that's what matters. Looks like my current rig is OK for the time being.

I'd say these processors would be awesome running Databases, maybe even give a low end Itanium a run for its money.

I didn't read the article again to check but there's one other thing that might be useful to look at, and that is memory overclocked above the 'FSB' (is that QPI now?) speed. That's one area that has caused much confusion and differing opinions in the past. An article extension exploring that would be great.

If this doesn't apply to i7 because of the way the system architecture works, please ignore :) It was just a thought that popped in to my head from various past overclocking articles.

I find these kind of articles very interesting. It does reveal a lot about how this new technology works.

But what surprises me the most is that, with all this new technology and two GTX 280s in SLI that you still can't get more than 76fps in Crysis at just 1024x768!

I was expecting more dramatic improvement than that. Hardly seems worth the expense. I think I will wait quite a while before moving to this platform.

Interesting, I read sometime ago (I think it was at X-bit labs) that Intel was expecting Nehalem (for me it will allways be Nehalem, i think it's a much more "cool" name) CPUs to answer for something like between 3% ~ 5% of all desktop parts, all the way up to 2010.

So they clearly were not aiming for the Desktop, at least not for now, and quoting Usacomp2k3: " I presume server use might benefit more."

I say, sure.

That was the last AMD stronghold, and where the profit margins are the highest.

I mean, "When your enemy is finally down to his knees... Kick him."

And that's what they are doing...

is the QPI speed on the 965 correct? According to your other review, it's faster than that of the 920.

It looks like triple-channel DDR3 is overkill for the most part.

Nehelam is certainly not memory bandwidth starved. It is certainly sensitive to latency, but to a minor degree.

The only reason to get fast DDR3 DIMMs is for overclocking.

I've heard you can get to 1800Mhz with these HyperX modules with a 920 CPU,

if you enable XMP in BIOS.
then reboot, and boom, 1800Mhz.

have you tried that?

W00t! Thanks a bunch. The biggest thing I take away is that the 920 is pretty much just as good as the 965. Heh.

I keep thinking 965 refers to the chipset, and not the processor

This is why I read Tech Report. I now have to change my memory choice on my Core i7 920 build.

Great article TR!

It's nice to see these types of benchmarks sometimes to reinforce my "ram speed doesn't matter much for games" statements.

Power usage numbers for IDLE/BUSY for all the mention configurations would have been interesting.

So, get an i7 920 and DDR3-1066 CL7 (or, if an overclocker, DDR3-1600) and call it done?

I have to wonder, is it an artifact of the load that causes the dual-channel DDR3-1066 CL9 configuration to beat out the three-channel DDR3-1066 CL7 configuration on latency in synthetic tests? What's the latency like under load as opposed to unloaded?

If I understood the article correctly, only the memory clocks were changed. If thats true It makes perfect sense that the scores changed very little. It seems like the best reason for buying faster memory is to overclock the processor.

Nice review and the results are somewhat weird at times.
Was a bit dissapointed to see Worldbench beeing the bulk of apps tests since it seems to minimize the performance differences.

Very good read. Thanks for this.
Reminds me of a podcast topic...

FIRST!!!