We've been waiting not so patiently for the last several months for Intel's newest CPU to hit the market. Well now Intel's Core i7 Nehalem has arrived and so have the early reviews. Listed below are reviews featuring the first three offering the Intel Core i7 940, 920 and 965 Extreme Edition. Pricing for the processors is not set yet but the estimates look fairly steep.
The 965 is an Extreme Edition processor which is said to cost an estimated $1410, while the 940 is roughly half as expensive at $720, and the 920 costs just $370.
Reviews:
- Legion Hardware - Core i7 940, 920 and 965 Extreme Edition
- Tweak Town - Intel Core i7 – Nehalem Arrives and FSB Departs
- BenchmarkReviews.com - Intel Core i7 CPU & DX58SO X58 Platform
- PC Perspective - Nehalem Revolution: Intel's Core i7 Processor Complete Review
- TechSpot - Intel Core i7 920, 940 and 965 Extreme Edition review
- Guru 3d - Intel Core i7 920 and 965 review | Core i7 SupaDupa Multi-GPU Game performance review
- OverClockersBlub - Intel Core i7 Review
The Core i7 940 and 920 chips are clocked at 2.93GHz and 2.66GHz respectively, while they both boast a 256KB L2 cache along with an 8MB shared L3 cache. The on-die memory controller for these two chips supports triple-channel DDR3-800/1066 memory, while the QuickPath Interconnect supports a throughput of 4.8 GT/s.
The much more expensive Core i7 965 Extreme Edition processor features the same amount of L2/L3 cache, along with the same memory support. The key difference is in its clock frequency of 3.20GHz, while the QuickPath Interconnect throughput has been boosted to 6.4 GT/s.
Legion hardware's final thoughts probably sum it up best;
Wow … this is really all I could say when testing the new Core i7 processors, what an amazing piece of hardware. Despite having known the exact specifications for quite some time now, and already having had high hopes for the Core i7 series, it is fair to say they exceeded all of our expectations. After all, when you consider just how impressive the existing Core 2 processors are, who really thought that a little more than 2 years later we would see their demise to a greatly superior processor.
If it was 300 dollars or lower, I would hop into my car and speed to Bestbuy and grab it with a big stupid smile on my face.
ReplyDeleteThe cost of the chips themselves isn't really that bad, its the jump to a new board, which can be expensive, and the change over to DDR3 that for early adopters was pretty costly. Right now those costs are down considerably but personally I'd go with one of the newer i5's over the i7.
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