Nick Race03 November 2008, 3:00 PM
This smoking new CPU from Intel does away with Frontside Bus altogether and brings a technology back from the dead.
Page 7 - Benchmark results
We put the Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition through some benchmarks against an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 on the following testbenches:
Bloomfield test system
CPU: Core i7 965 Extreme Edition
Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe
Memory: Corsair Dominator @ DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 1T 6GB (3x2GB)
Graphics: GIGABYTE HD4870 1024MB
PSU: Silverstone OP1000
Storage: Intel X25-M
Penryn test system
CPU: Core 2 Extreme QX9770
Motherboard: Foxconn BlackOps
Memory: Corsair Dominator @ DDR3-1600 7-7-7-21 2T 2GB (2x1GB)
Graphics: GIGABYTE HD4870 1024MB
PSU: Thermaltake Tough Power 1200
Storage: Intel X25-M
For this first look, we prepared some basic benchmarks including PC Mark Vantage, 3D Mark Vantage and Crytek's Crysis CPU benchmarks. The Vantage benchmarks show a marked difference in performance between the Core i7 and QX9770 processors, however under Crysis, there's less difference to be seen as optimisations for multiple cores aren't enabled under Vista.
Crytek Crysis - Windows Vista 64
Products on Shelves
Released in the next few weeks will be three Bloomfield products, the Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition at 3.2GHz, the Intel Core i7 920 at 2.66GHz and another Core i7 product at 2.93Ghz. Intel X58 Express based motherboards will be available from launch from Intel, MSI, GIGABYTE, ASUS and EVGA.
More Reading
Intel QuickPath Interconnect Whitepaper (PDF)