The Dark Knight: Intel's Core i7
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on November 3, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
General Application Performance
SYSMark 2007 is an application benchmark suite that plays back real world usage scenarios in four categories (E-Learning, Video Creation, Productivity and 3D), using the following applications:
Adobe After Effects 7
Adobe Illustrator CS2
Adobe Photoshop CS2
AutoDesk 3ds Max 8
Macromedia Flash 8
Microsoft Excel 2003
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Microsoft PowerPoint 2003
Microsoft Word 2003
Microsoft Project 2003
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 series
Sony Vegas 7
SketchUp 5
WinZip 10.0
Performance is measured in each individual category and then an overall score is reported.
We don't see a huge performance increase thanks to Nehalem, we're looking at an average boost of 7 - 12% at the same clock speed as Penryn. The Core i7-965 managed a 7% performance advantage over the QX9770, while the i7-920 pulled 12% on the identically clocked Q9450.
The biggest performance boost is naturally in the 3D suite, the rest of the applications are showing 5 - 10% performance boosts at the same clock.
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Jingato - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
If the 920 can easily be overclocked to 3.8Ghz on air, what intensive is there to purchase the 965 for more that triple the price?TantrumusMaximus - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
I don't understand why the tests were on such low resolutions... most gamers are running higher res than 1280x1024 etc etc....What gives?
daniyarm - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Because if they ran gaming benchmarks at higher res, the difference in FPS would be hardly visible and you wouldn't go out and buy a new CPU.If they are going to show differences between Intel and AMD CPUs, show Nehalem at 3.2 GHz vs 9950 OC to 3.2 GHz so we can see clock for clock differences in performance and power.
npp - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
9950 consumes about 30W more at idle than the 965XE, and 30W less under load. I guess that OC'ing it to 3,2Ghz will need more than 30W... Given that the 965 can process 4 more threads, I think the result should be more or less clear.tim851 - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Higher resolutions stress the GPU more and it will become a bottleneck. Since the article was focussing on CPU power and not GPU power they were lowering the resolution enough to effectively take the GPU out of the picture.Caveman - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
It would be nice to see these CPU reviews use relevant "gaming" benchmarks. It would be good to see the results with something like MS flight simulator FSX or DCS Black Shark, etc... The flight simulators these days are BOTH graphically and calculation intensive, but really stress the CPU.AssBall - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
No, they don't, actually.philosofool - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
It would have been nice to see a proper comparison of power consumption. Given all of Intel's boast about being able to shut off cores to save power, I'd like to see some figures about exact savings.nowayout99 - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Ditto, I was wondering about power too.Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Soon, soon my friend :)-A