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

[naokaji]

This review uses a single 9800gtx and dual channel DDR3 1066
I think we can pretty much put this in the recycling bin and wait for trash day.

QFT, no point in a "review" if they cripple the cpu like that.

Maybe there's a big reason for it a year from now, but by then we all wait for 32 nm and remembers the first, buggy X58 systems.

Why wait with upgrading? there will always be something better around the corner anyway.

[demonkevy666]

well I guess maybe they should have tried SLI or Crossfire to see any big gains for all of you.

[RPGWiZaRD]

Why wait with upgrading? there will always be something better around the corner anyway.

If it's not much better (if any) for the specific tasks that are important to yourself? And then by waiting you get something better for the same money you'd spend now.

I do think i7 is an excellent first product for the radical changes that's been and had to be made though. It's just it's not so far very attractive for my computer usage.

[Metroid]

I have seen this review yesterday and surely thought it would not be worth enough for a thread however I do agree with the author in some parts of this review. If you want FPS increase in games why bother buying Nehalem?

Another problem lies on how much Nehalem will lessen GPU bottlenecks and at this very moment none of it was answered.

GPU = Games.
CPU = General tasks.

It is clearly shown and known by many people that Nehalem is an amazing first step arch attempt by Intel on delivering high efficient performance for most IT related, general view.

So yes Nehalem is much better than anything we have or have had so far, only the price is a let-down and the real need for it is minor at this very moment for some users as for me I'm sure I will be using every single core, 3 cores for games and the rest for folding or working, (CPU, MB and MM) for only $900. A bargain I would say.

Metroid.

[Mats]

Why wait with upgrading? there will always be something better around the corner anyway.

For gamers there's no reason to upgrade from a decent C2Q system, put your money on storage or GPU's instead.

[Jacky]

This is a pretty strange preview.

QFT, no point in a "review" if they cripple the cpu like that.

Crippled? Yes, but if performs awesome nonetheless! However, some of the numbers are really odd. Cinebench results are pretty low and the single-threaded test shows an incredible gain of ~19% compared to the Q9770 (I thought it was only 5-6% faster judging by all the other tests). Maybe it's all due to the low-end memory/overclocked QPI...

This is very disappointing for gamers, this means we'll have to wait for the next arch SandyBridge and (a big maybe) AMDs Bulldozer to see any real improvement in games. On the upside if the most cpu intensive apps you run are games and you allready have a 45nm C2D you won't have to spend money on a CPU anytime soon.

Yep, disappointing for gamers, but for everyone else...

A quick calculation showed nehalem to be ~17% faster overall, ~25% w/o games and ~32% w/o games and some of the most useless synthetic benchmarks.

EDIT:
Does anyone know if turbo mode was enabled *and* worked in this review?

[Blauhung]

For gamers there's no reason to upgrade from a decent C2Q system, put your money on storage or GPU's instead.

yup, as has been said many times before, a nice fast dual core and a top end GPU are all you need to play high quality games quickly. Nehalem is the faster chip through the gains in compute throughput (smt/turbo), and huge leaps on the memory bandwidth and latency fronts. Next generation games are slowly catching up, but it will be a while still before game devs can optomize their code to take full advantage of the hardware that is available, while maintaining support and performance on older mainstream as well.

[RPGWiZaRD]

Oh yea Nehalem would rock for mem performance bragging rights but it's a little too expensive bragging right for me.

[Solus Corvus]

A quick calculation showed nehalem to be ~17% faster overall, ~25% w/o games and ~32% w/o games and some of the most useless synthetic benchmarks.

Uh oh, you mean it's not 50% faster on average? Someone's going to be disappointed.

[gallag]

Uh oh, you mean it's not 50% faster on average? Someone's going to be disappointed.

????who???

[Mr.Guvernment]

This review uses a single 9800gtx and dual channel DDR3 1066
I think we can pretty much put this in the recycling bin and wait for trash day.

for HL2 that is fine, that card can take HL2 on high res and everything cranked easily,, and HL2 loves CPU power.

[eric66]

so this is mighty nehalem pfft and how much we must pay for it ?

[Hornet331]

for HL2 that is fine, that card can take HL2 on high res and everything cranked easily,, and HL2 loves CPU power.

yup HL2 need cpu power like mad, try playing TF2 on a 32player server, anything below 3,5ghz -> welcome bleow 30fps.

@everybody that is whining

if you dont like what you see dont buy it, quite your whining about the price if you cant afford it, a stick to to cheap dual cores... i bet 2/3 of the people in this thread wont buy a nehelem the next 2 months anyway...

[gallag]

Why just post the gaming benchmarks?

[Hornet331]

Why just post the gaming benchmarks?

cause the other benche dont put nehalem in a bad light.

[JumpingJack]

cause the other benche dont put nehalem in a bad light.

The gaming benches don't put Nehalem in a bad light .. they just don't meet expectations, however, when properly analyzed ... Nehalem should do well in gaming.

EDIT: Also he die shot the site pilfered from Hans Devries is slightly inaccurate (it was made long ago before other details were known), it is 3 channel 192 bit however, running 2 sticks is 128 bit in this review.

[K404]

Would Nehalem offer more grunt in gaming with tri-SLI and CF-X maybe?- at the mo, things are horribly CPU-bottlenecked with that much GPU power.

I know Nehalem gives a FAT boost in SPi32M and will realistically be great with wPrime. Maybe its not being reviewed in the right way yet?

I dont mean..review it with a slant that makes it look good, but I think there might be more bases to cover than what we've seen so far

It will be a must have for benching/synthetics/HWB. The 940 appears the minimum CPU with a point, and I hear that some options are saved for the top-end chip- related to the higher stock multi I believe, but taking the advantage of a QX in a nw direction

[JumpingJack]

Would Nehalem offer more grunt in gaming with tri-SLI and CF-X maybe?- at the mo, things are horribly CPU-bottlenecked with that much GPU power.

Short answer is yes ... maybe... depends on the game.

Here is a test for those interested.... if you have WIC and a C2D ...

Run WIC benchmark at high preset at 1280x800, clock your processor at 2.4 GHz ... then run it again, but clock the processor at 3.2 Ghz ... even on a 4870 X2, I get the same frame rates for either 2.4 GHz or 3.2 GHz ..... the 9800 GTX+ is yesterday's technology -- the data shown in this review are simply showing you that a 9800 GTX+ does not need a high end CPU to max out. ... using high settings (which is where we like to play the game) pushes the burden to the GPU ... no amount of CPU power will change the answer. In that vain, Nehalem is probably not where you want to spend your money at this point.

Jack

[Kondik]

All this time i've been praying for the Core i7 to completely render my current Q6600 Overclocked obsolete.


I'm sticking to my current CPU and just buying a new GPU and an SSD instead.

Yup Exactly .. 2 ~ 4 SSD's and a new VGA and let's wait for 2010 and 8 Cores

[T_Flight]

The deal with Nehalem is people have had these wild notions about what it's "going to do", and not what "it's actually going to do".

Nehalem will not hurt game performance, but if you do more than game with your computer Nehalem will rape the older technology and leave it sore for a week.

People like me who like to build a system with gaming/flight simming in mind, but also do real work that takes massive ammounts of CPU power will love this thing. It's also going to be a folding beast which is also something I take into account. I fold 24/7, and I want the most WU's going to Standford that I can for the money I put into my machine. I don't waste clock cycles by letting my computer sit idle. It is always doing work 24/7.

I use specialized flow programs, and engineering programs that also take massive ammounts of CPU power. I have one right now that I cannot run without going to a freinds house. That is how bad I need this kind of power.

I also have videos piled up here that need encoding, and that is painfully slow to the point that it's the reason I have videos piled up here waiting to be encoded. I hate that chore. I've put it off even more because I'm waiting on this new CPU to do that.

Gaming is not what these CPU's are about. They are about doing real work, and getting it done as fast as possible. Any gaming performance you get is just a bonus.

Gaming performance is just a bonus, but it's not a reason to buy a computer. If you get extra gaming performance great, but if it works with todays games and doesn't get one FPS faster performance that is just fine with me. As long as it works. As long as I get smooth flying when I'm online that's all that matters.

This is not a gaming CPU. It is the "Total Package" "Do It All" powerhouse. Personally I'm gonna couple it with a GTX280 and I have no doubt it will absolutely fly. I'm also putting it on water, so cooling and OC'ing performance will most definitely be on the Xtreme of the Xtreme side.


Edited to Add: BTW, SSD's are a complete waste of money. They have the most rediculous pricetag for the lowest performance and feature set I have ever seen. I won't even be looking at one again for at least another two years if not more. I have studied them, and they have no storage space, have numerous bugs, and performance is horrible. Heck, they wouldn't even add to anyone's e-peen length. They'd actually make it shrivel up like jumping into a pool of ice water! HAHAHA

[Mk]

All this time i've been praying for the Core i7 to completely render my current Q6600 Overclocked obsolete.


I'm sticking to my current CPU and just buying a new GPU and an SSD instead.

me 2

[Linchpin]

I'm still waiting to see if Nehalem bottlenecks Tri-SLI as much as current quads.

[initialised]

yup HL2 need cpu power like mad, try playing TF2 on a 32player server, anything below 3,5ghz -> welcome bleow 30fps.

@everybody that is whining

if you dont like what you see dont buy it, quite your whining about the price if you cant afford it, a stick to to cheap dual cores... i bet 2/3 of the people in this thread wont buy a nehelem the next 2 months anyway...

Hmm nah, on ZPS I sometimes drop to very little but I blame that on poor server code. My rig normally runs a 3.4GHz when gaming and since upgrading to 4870 (from 2900XT XF) I've noticed a massive drop in slow downs (except the first play on some maps, 2fort in the centre) in TF2 but now never below 40fps.

Anyhoo, I'm thinking of upgrading my CPU and the E7x00 class look very promising for price/performance. Once OC'd over 4.0GHz they'd probably still hold their own in anything less than a Tri-SLi or QuadFire setup or Crysis.

If UT3 is truely multi threading can you give us some max/min/avg fps data comparing 1, 2 ,3 & 4 cores enabled?

[JumpingJack]

If UT3 is truely multi threading can you give us some max/min/avg fps data comparing 1, 2 ,3 & 4 cores enabled?

I have that info, I will post it shortly.... probably one of the best multithreaded engines out there.

EDIT: This is core scaling using a Phenom 9850 at stock conditions. The asus M3A32-MVP has BIOS options for down-coring, i.e. you can choose in BIOS to do 1,2,3 or 4 cores active. The data was collected using UT3 patched to 1.1, an nVidia 8800 GTX (forceware 175.19), and 2 gigs of ram. The utility UT3Bench.exe was used to benchmark a perpecutal bot match of 12 bots for 60 seconds, using the Deathray DM map, at low settings (to extract the CPU performance), at 640x480 and 1280x1024 ... each 'core' setting and resolution was run 6 times, the value for each run is in the table, the average is also calculated. I ran at 640x480 vs 1280x1024 to show that this bench is CPU limited so it is testing the capability of the CPU.

The greatest jump goes from 1 core to 2, a smaller jump from 2 to 3 cores, and about even with 4 ... at the 3 core setting, all 3 cores show 100% in task manager, at 4 cores settings each is about 75% utilized, the overall utilization averages around 80% meaning UT3 is good for about 3.2 cores ...

The NR entry means that I accidentally miscounted the number of runs and for that series I ran only 5 instead of 6 runs... on average it did not affect the results greatly.



Jack

[RPGWiZaRD]

I have that info, I will post it shortly.... probably one of the best multithreaded engines out there.

Jack

Yea I concur this, I've seen results posted on 2 different forums regarding UT3 FPS multicore scaling tests. Still above 2 cores the difference starts become rather small, a gap of which a higher clocked dual core CPU that isn't as much fsb wall strangled as a quad is, can fill up quite well. But UT3 depends a lot on the CPU too that's for sure and I notice it particularly well since I'm only on a 19" CRT and using res 1280x960.

A bit offtopic but useful info regarding this game, I use this game to determine if my RAM & CPU is gaming stable too as it's better finding instability than even Orthos or memtest sometimes (not kidding). I had UT3 crashing on me randomly and wondered why since no other stress tests I used failed on me, but it turned out to be ram instability and now UT3 runs happily again.