Conclusive Thoughts

The Core i7 delivers what it promised: better performance. But there isn’t a huge boost in single threaded applications. We compared triple to dual and single, but that just gave close to 0 extra performances. Although it is working correctly, delivering up to 25 Gigabyte per second memory bandwidth, this platform doesn't need it for the moment.

The current crop of mainboards based on the Intel X58 are feature rich and offer everything you'll need, including Crossfire and SLI support on a select group of third party motherboards.

Price wise we were not expecting this new platform to be cheap, and we are not proven wrong; the cheapest Core i7 capable motherboards hover around €300, while the entry level i7 920 is also close to €300, combine this with a capable DDR3 memory kit and you’re looking at ~€1000 for CPU/Motherboard/RAM. Knowing that you can build a fast Core 2 Duo (or even Quad) system for less than half of that, the current pricing of the Core i7 doesn’t make it very cost effective.

We spotted already some prices at the Dutch Tweakers.net Pricewatch.

The boards we had:

Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition € 300

Intel DX58SO € 275

Some other boards:

Asus P6T Deluxe € 265

MSI X58 Platinum € 250

MSI Eclipse SLI € 336

Prices go down to 250 euro, but that still expensive.

When we take a look at the lowest cpu prices:

Core i7 920 € 280

Core i7 940 € 550

Core i7 965 XE € 970

The i7 920 not that expensive for a new product launch but it does have one drawback, if you aim to buy it to overclock, please keep in mind that the multiplier is fixed and lower than the higher end units, so you'll reach overclocking limits at around 3.5~4Ghz,. Since the BCLK doesn’t' go very high on most boards, and the multiplier is locked on the 920, still we can’t really complain, any extra speed got from overclocking is free in our book, and adding +1Ghz, which makes it faster than the i7 965 XE which costs almost 4x as much, is far from bad.

Core i7 Recommended for



PRO
Slightly better single threaded performance than Core 2 Duo
Hyperthreading pushes multithreaded performance higher up
Both SLI and Crossfire on the X58 mainboards.


CON
Expensive mainboards
Triple channel doesn’t improve performance noticeably
Not an overclocking miracle as their other 45nm processors

Stay tuned for more coverage of the Core i7 which will have a hard product launch in about 2 weeks when the new CPUs and motherboard will find their way into retail at larger quantities.

We would like to thank the following people who made this review possible

- Milan from Asus for the P6T mainboard.
- Kristof from Intel Benelux for the CPUs and the rest of the press kit.
- Emanuel from Tones for providing us a i7 setup to play with and their support.
- Thorgal and Massman to do some extra benching to make have some comparison material.