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Intel Core i7 920 and 965 XE CPU Review

CPU by piotke @ 2008-11-03

In a few weeks you can find a brand new Intel CPU at your local hardware shop, it still carries the Core name but it is drastically different compared to their previous Core 2 units. The Core i7 has an onboard memory controller and hyperthreading is re-introduced. We compare the performance of the entry level 920 model as well as the high end 965 XE.

Bios exploration Intel X58

Intel Extreme Motherboard DX58SO

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Welcome / booting screen. To enter Bios press the "F2" key on your keyboard.

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And you'll get welcomed immediately with the general specifications of your system. To return here later on just go to the Main tab. Here you can also disable multiple cores and also Hyper Threading.

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In the Advanced tab you can find the usual BIOS options, such as enabling/disabling integrated peripheral, boot info, drive settings, ... And more interesting to us, hardware monitoring.

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The performance tab is where it's all happening. After a short info bulletin, you can enable the performance settings.

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It starts fairly simple. The Failsafe Watchdog will recover your BIOS to default settings when you had booting troubles. This feature works very decently, so I can only advise you to let it on. You can undo the automatic control of the Host Clock Frequency ...

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... and you can immediately start raising the bus speed (formerly known as FSB, but I'll continue using this term from time to time).

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Once you enter the Processor Override submenu you can change more options related to the processor. Starting with the voltage. The Enhanced Power slope is what we call Vcore droop. While pushing about 300 watts trough the CPU, the Vcore remained very stable, so also here I'm advising you to use it.

Next in this screen you can change throttle options, and overclock or let automatically overclock, trough the multipliers.

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In the Memory configuration menu you can change everything that is memory related. Timings, voltage and frequency. The frequency isn't made clearly visible, but you'll find it as the memory multiplier.

A small list showing the memory multiplier and its' speed:
Multiplier ==> Resulting Frequency

6 ==> 800 MHz

8 ==>1066 MHz

10 ==> 1333 MHz

12 ==> 1600 MHz

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This is the last screen I'll show from the Intel mainboard BIOS. You can actually change the other bus speeds here.

This Intel board was also the board we used for the overclocking tests. You'll find them on the next page.

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