3.2G OC'd CORE i7 940 vs. 3.16Ghz Stock E8500 vs. 3.2Ghz Stock QX9770 Complete Review

[JumpingJack]

I see your point, but who is buying a nehalem system in order to play CPU limited DX7 and DX8 games that already run in the 100's of fps though?

The thing you *need* more performance for is current day games and if they're so GPU bound at 12x10 on average, I'd say it's probably not worth the price to someone who wants gaming performance. Just my opinion though.

Do you mean to imply that we don't know the CPUs gaming potential purely because they tested 12x10 with GPU limited settings? If so, you might have problems in the future, because that trend is only going to continue, and the average resolution is going up, not down.

Should they have bumped down resolution to settings that no one plays at to gauge the CPUs "gaming performance"? Sure if you're benchmarking by running a game at 800x600 you can call it "gaming performance" but it's not real-world gaming performance.

I guess the fundamental question is.. what is "gaming performance"?

Exactly ... to your rhetorical question ... meaning who would buy this purely for gaming (see my response to Glow above).

I own probably 200 games from Doom to my most recent purchase Spore.... I have played maybe 10 all the way through ... but I use them to stress and play with the GPU, CPU, etc combos ... it's just what I like to do.

I use my computer mostly for other things, some modeling, NLE editing, etc. So Nehalem is looking pretty darn nice to me.

EDIT: In terms of gaming 'performance', i.e. what is it... that is in the eye of the beholder in my opinion. The output that we measure to ascertain a performance number is frames per second ... which actually isn't even that, your monitor will only display 60 (in some cases 75 or 100) frames per second, and anything over 60 FPS is a waste. What you are actually measuring is the number of times the frame buffer is refreshed by the GPU. Even that is meaningless, because the performance that we 'measure' is a small slice of the overall game -- typically 30, 60 or 120 seconds of a game that should last several hours .... this is not very representative (statistically) of the population anyway.

Jack