Intel Core i7 Review Thread

[savantu]

There are a lot of dots sent to the video card, also on Core 2 the FSB handles both memory and video traffic. Haven't read about i7 but a assume that it can handle ram and video card independently.

I'm pretty sure GPUs tax memory a lot more than the CPU in a graphic intensive game.

In FSB topology you have :

-CPU-FSB-RAM
-GPU-FSB-CPU
-GPU-RAM

With QPI topology you have
-CPU-RAM
-GPU-QPI-CPU
-GPU-QPI-CPU-RAM

Basically FSB has the upper hand in GPU accessing memory while the QPI system is in CPU accessing memory.
Core beating the crap out of K8/10 in games is proof that the FSB isn't really a bottleneck because GPUs care more about accessing memory than flooding the FSB with data ( which btw , I believe isn't exactly large in size , I'd even venture to say that latency is more important )

Disclaimer - All of the above is a guess and should be taken with a spoon of salt.