Intel Core i7 Processors: Nehalem and X58 Have Arrived

Name: Intel Core i7 Processors: Nehalem and X58 Have Arrived - Page 13
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, November 03, 2008, 12:00 AM EDT

Next, we continued with some more low-res, in-game benchmarking with Unreal Tournament 3 and Enemy Territory Quake Wars. As was the case with the Crysis and F.E.A.R. on the previous page, here we also dropped the resolution to 800x600, and reduced all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible.

Low-Resolution Gaming: UT3 and ETQW

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

Chalk up two more clear victories for the new Core i7 processors. In both Unreal Tournament 3 and Quake Wars Enemy Territory, even the lowest clocked Core i7 920 processor was able to outperform the highest clocked Core 2 Extreme. Disabling Hyper-Threading resulted in a marginal performance increase in both games. And once again the ASUS motherboard we tested put up relatively strong numbers in light of its competition. The Gigabyte board also performed well, besting Intel's offering in both tests, but ASUS seems to have done a bit more tweaking at this early stage of the X58 Express chipset's lifecycle.

Tags: Intel, core i7, X58, Processors, Nehalem, Core, processor, CES, i7, HAL, process, Intel Core i7, AV, x5, arrive, Ive, pro, SSO, AR, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com