Consumer Reviews

I upgraded to the i7 from an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400. The main reasons I made the upgrade were:

1. Low power consumption (significantly lower than a Q6600 which is about $100 cheaper than the i7)
2. 8 logical cores available (quad core + hyper threading)
3. The ability to play cutting edge games that take advantage of all 8 cores.
4. The potential ability to load share between CPU & GPU once Windows 7 is released.

The upgrade might have been a bit premature, as the primary reason to buy an I7 processor won’t be possible until Windows 7 is released. Windows 7 will allow load sharing between GPU (graphics card) and CPU. This will enable some really nice performance gains in games, or other graphic intensive applications like video editing software. Allegedly, games like Crysis will get a 20-30 percent performance increase. However, I heard that before when Windows stated that Vista would provide significant performance gains for DirectX10 games, which has not proved to be the case.

Regardless, the i7 920 is truly an amazing CPU. I’ve yet to experiment with overclocking much, but I do have it running at 3.12ghz stable and with a core temperature of 41C at idle and around 60C under load. I’ll likely push things further in the coming weeks, and I’ll give updates on temperatures and performance when I do.

Combining this card with two 4870hd 512mb graphics cards in Crossfire mode produced a 3DMark06 score of just over 19,000! That is a 5,000 point gain from my previous rig, and is in about the top 4% of all systems out there. That is pretty phenomenal performance. In Crysis with all settings at very high and DX10, I average over 50 frames at 1980×1200. This CPU is a gaming beast.

If you plan to overclock this card even a little, invest in an aftermarket heat sink and some Arctic Silver thermal compound. The heatsink provided with the retail package is small and ineffective at cooling an overclocked card. I recommend this Zalman Cpu Cooler for moderate overclocking. It is a very quite and very effective fan.

If your in the market for a ‘future-proof’ processor, this is a great option at a reasonable price point. The ceiling speed of processors is growing increasingly unimportant as multi-thread programing become the norm in both games and applications. You could spend a lot more for a higher GHZ CPU, but you’re not really gaining as much performance as the jump from 2 to 4 cores, and then quad core to octo core. This processor will eat anything you throw at it and come back for more. Just make sure your mother board supports i7 chips before you buy one.

Before you choose to go the I7 route there are few things you really should consider. The first is just how much speed you might actually need for the games and applications you are trying to run. The second is just what parts are you going to need to do that and how much are you going to need to spend.

I’m going to make this as concise as possible. For a huge array of games you will not see any difference between an I7 920 and a Phenom II 920 or even a Phenom 9600 with the TLB patch disabled. I’ve tested this all with triple GPU Radeon 4850 setups. It is the simple truth. Most monitors are not capable of displaying more than 60 frames per second so all the extra headroom an I7 offers above the 60hz cap of most monitors with vertical sync on is lost. If you don’t game with VSYNC on you will see tearing and it significantly impacts visual quality so don’t do that. There is no way to tell the difference between setups on a wide variety of games including Devil May Cry 4, FEAR, Hellgate London, Mass Effect, Company of Heroes and Jericho. I’m sure there are more but you get the idea. My triple GPU Radeon 4850 PCs are already too fast with “moderate” powered Phenom and Phenom II processors in the majority of popular games at 1080p and even more so at 2560 * 1600 where the GPUs handle the greater load. We really don’t need what the I7 offers today and to buy anything in the PC industry with tommorrow in mind is to get left behind. You need to live in the now and consider there will be much better processors available when we actually need the power to run future software.

I have already built 2 I7 920 based PCs and I have been an AMD builder for years. I felt burned by the TLB erratum issue with first gen Phenoms and went I7 before Phenom II was released. I didn’t think there would be so little difference in real world use for gaming. It is frustrating to see the truth but I have to face it. So what do you get with an I7 920 compared to lets say a Phenom II 920? You get a similar gaming experience today with higher heat and higher benchmark scores and a higher price.

Stepping up from a Pentium D, or the Core 2 Duo P9500 on my laptop, I’m just amazed at the power of this CPU. I’m currently running Windows 7 (RC) 64-bit, with 12GB of Corsair 1333MHz DDR3 RAM on an Asus P6T motherboard, with two WD 1TB drives. Everything is at stock speeds. Video is nVidia GeForce 9600 GT with two ViewSonic monitors.

Windows 7 delivers everything you’d want with the Core i7 processor in terms of speed and power. The 8MB L3 cache is a great adaptation for 64-bit processing – it’s not widely noted, but running in 64-bit mode will give a 1.2x to 1.4x speed reduction, because the larger addresses reduce cache utilization. The Core i7’s cache configuration compensates nicely for this. The QuickPath Interconnect, DDR3 memory, and three memory channels also help speed up memory access, so that memory is never a bottleneck. Overall, my system rates a Windows Experience score of 5.9, based on graphics and disk speed, but the Core i7 rates an amazing 7.4 score, and memory is 7.5.

In the task manager performance panel, you see 8 CPUs, for the 4 cores and their hyperthreads. Windows 7 scheduling and threading has been updated to work with more cores and to use hyperthreads effectively; if you want more on this, listen to this podcast:[...] featuring one of the Windows kernel development team members who works on thread scheduling.

In terms of user experience, I’ve never experienced such a responsive machine. Nothing makes it break a sweat! Photoshop uses the GPU for image rendering, and it’s breathtakingly fast on image editing. Visual Studio compiles large projects many times faster than the same project on my old machines. Whatever I want, this machine does it, right now!

For those who ask if there is software that can take advantage of the multiple cores, the answer is yes. Photoshop and other Adobe image and video editors have been multicore-aware for many years. Most of the MS Office apps are heavily threaded and very responsive (Outlook, Word, and Excel especially). Visual Studio runs background compiles constantly for syntax checking, and Intellisense support is always immediate. And for web development, IIS and your database of choice (SQL Server, in my case) are right ther in the background, ready to go. SQL Server, in particular, is well-designed for multicore systems.

This is simply a fantastic machine, even if you’re not a gamer.