Digital Storm's Core i5 System Reviewed
Test Systems
 |
|
System 1: Digital Storm i750 Intel Core i5 750 @ 3.8GHz EVGA P55 FTW ATX 4GB Mushkin DDR3-1600 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 SLI 1TB WD Caviar Black Vista Home Premium x64 Price: $ 1896.00 USD |
System 2: Alienware Aurora ALX Intel Core i7 975 3.33GHz Alienware X58 MicroATX 6GB Corsair DDR3-1600 ATI Radeon 5870 CrossFire 1TB Seagate HDD RAID 0 Vista Home Premium x64 Price: $ 4,074.00 USD |
System 3: CyberPower Gamer Extreme 3000 Intel Core i7 860 2.8GHz Asus P7P55D Delux P55 4GB Kingston DDR3-1600 EVGA NVIDIA GTX 295 1.5TB Seagate HDD Vista Home Premium x64 Price: $ 1,599.00 USD |
System 4: iBuyPower Gamer Paladin F970 Intel Core i7 965 3.2GHz Asus P6T Deluxe V2 X58 12GB Corsair DDR3-1333 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 128GB SSD / 1TB HDD Vista Ultimate 64-bit Price: $ 3,111.00 USD |
Multi-core Performance and Hyper-Threading:
One performance comparison our Digital Storm testbed unintentionally raises is the impact of Hyper-Threading. The other systems tested here are all quad-cores with Hyper-Threading enabled, which gives them the ability to execute up to eight simultaneous threads across four virtual cores and four real ones. The i750, while limited to four "real" cores and just two DDR3-1600 memory channels, is clocked 15 percent higher than its closest competitor in that regard, the Aurora ALX. What makes this comparison interesting is the fact that Hyper-Threading's ability to deliver additional performance is limited by the degree of parallelism that the CPU's scheduling unit can extract from a given application. Windows "sees" eight cores and reports the existence of such, but there's a distinct difference between a quad-core with HT enabled (4L+4V) and an actual octal-core processor.
Based on the characteristics of typical consumer-level applications, we expect the quad-core Lynnfield to match or even surpass the performance of the slower-but-wider Core i7s in some situations. This might not be the case if we focused on professional software that's been designed and optimized for parallel execution; apps that can significantly utilize >4 cores will likely buck the trend.
