LGA 1156 Core i7s & Core i5s Reviews

[hollo]

If the pci-e controller would be at its limit, you would see consistant bad results in all games, but you dont.
Thers also another point why Ci7 sometimes losses in games to C2 or PII, its 2nd lvl cache. Games that love huge 2nd lvl cache have the best prformance on C2 followed by PII and i7 (6mb > 2mb >1mb). You could agruue that i7 has more total cache, but 3rd lvl cache is never as fast 2nd lvl or offers the same bandwidth.

+1
it definitely looks more like a l2 bottleneck than a x58 PCI-e bottleneck when there are gaming benchmarks around where at low resolutions i7>p2>c2 and as resolution is increased c2>p2>i7

i dont think this can only explained by second level cache. ifso why it loose performance when we increase resolution?

maybe GPU bound situations require larger amounts of data to be transferred to the GPU with the CPU cache acting as a buffer? just speculating, because i7 owns low res. it seems unlikely that intel would screw up their PCI-e controller, or their x58 chipset, but i always thought 256k l2 was skinny