Intel Core i7 Processors: Nehalem and X58 Have Arrived

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings, DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel Core 2), or DDR3-1066 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel Core i7). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems  Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2009 SP1  Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2009 SP1, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran six of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 SP1 suite with Intel's new Core i7 Extreme 965 processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Multi-Core Efficiency, Memory Bandwidth, Memory Latency, and Cache and Memory).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds of 3.2GHz with 3GB of DDR3-1066 RAM running in triple-channel mode on the Intel DX58SO motherboard.

In all of the SANDRA tests we ran, the new Core i7 platform significantly outperformed all of the other systems in SiSoft's reference database.  In the CPU Arithmetic and Multi-Media benchmarks the Core i7 finished way out in front of the competition.  The same held true in the Multi-Core efficiency benchmark, where the Core i7 blew everything away until hitting the 4x128kb block size, at which point the graphs leveled out.

The Core i7 also shined in all of the various memory-related benchmarks.  In its stock form using a DDR3-1066 triple-channel configuration, the Core i7 Extreme 965 put up an impressive 18.33GB/s of memory bandwidth, with a latency score of 76ns, and over 66GB/s of combined cache / memory bandwidth.  All three results were superior to every non-Core i7 based system in the database by a wide margin.