The New Intel Core™ i7 and Simulations Page 2

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Test System Details

All testing was conducted on a fresh install of Windows Vista x64 Ultimate Edition with Service Pack 1.

The Core i7 test system used the following components:

• Intel Core i7 920 (2.66GHz)
• Intel Core i7 965 (3.2GHz)
• Intel DX58SO (X58 chipset) Extreme motherboard
• 3GB QIMONDA DDR3 1066 memory

The Core 2 test system used the components below:

• Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (3.2GHz)
• ASUS Maximum Formula (X38 chipset) motherboard
• 4GB Corsair DDR2 800 memory

Both test systems shared the following parts:

• Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive
• Plextor PX-712S DVD drive
• ATI Radeon 4870 1GB video card
• Corsair HX620W power supply unit

The latest BIOS and drivers were installed and all test applications patched. SimHQ’s CPU testing now consists of essentially two categories: low and high. The low category uses a low resolution, typically 800×600 if supported by the application, combined with low in-game settings, and the high category uses a resolution of 1280×1024 with higher, more demanding settings. The first category is intended to allow the CPUs to differentiate themselves in their performance scores without other subsystems, such as memory or the GPU, becoming the bottleneck, and the latter category is meant to better reflect actual real-world usage of such parts. Below is the list of applications and games used during testing.

Below is the list of software discussed on the recently updated How SimHQ Tests PC Hardware Components page.

Synthetics

• 3DMark Vantage
• PCMark Vantage

Simulations / Games

• Flight Simulator X
• IL-2: 1946
• Silent Hunter 4
• GTR 2
• GRiD
• Call of Duty 4
• World in Conflict

Test Results – Synthetics

3DMark Vantage’s two CPU tests are heavily multithreaded. The scores shown below are the result of both tests.

Both Core i7s outperform the Core 2 processor by wide margins in this combined score.

PCMark Vantage’s various tests are organized in suites for testing the various subsystems of a computer. For this article we ran the suites for memory, hard drives, gaming, and the application’s standard score (which is a selection of tests from the various suites).

The total score produces a fairly close set of results, and the memory suite shows a small win for the Core 2 part against the mainstream Core i7 920. The higher QPI of the Core i7 965 shows a roughly 10% win for the CPU against the Core 2 part, and the gaming suite and some of its multithreaded tests show both Core i7s against significantly outperforming the older architecture.

SimHQ also decided to use PCMark Vantage to test for any performance variances between the two motherboard SATA controllers using the same WD VelociRaptor drive and Intel’s 80GB X25 solid-state drive, which was included in the Core i7 review kit. The individual tests comprising the hard drive suite, which uses Intel’s RankDisk benchmark and stresses real-world disk usage, are listed below. The X25 drive was tested with Intel’s DX58SO motherboard.

The two sets of test results show very little performance difference of the hard drive between the two test systems, with the X38 posting consistently higher in virtually every test. This minor variance could easily disappear with an updated motherboard BIOS and/or chipset driver. Intel’s X25 solid-state device, however, wiped the floor with the fastest rotating storage geared toward the consumer market, winning every single test (Media Center being the one exception) by astonishing margins. The downside on that amazing drive performance is the near $700 price tag for only 80GB of storage capacity.

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Related posts:

Core™ 2 the Extreme: Intel Retakes the Field Page 2 Core™ 2 the Extreme: Intel Retakes the Field Page 3 Intel’s Core™ 2 Extreme QX9650: Holding the Field Page 3 Intel’s Core 2™ Extreme QX6700: Quad Core Performance Preview Page 2 Intel’s Core 2™ Extreme QX6700: Quad Core Performance Preview Page 3 Intel’s Core 2™ Extreme QX6700: Quad Core Performance Preview Page 6 The New Intel Core™ i7 and Simulations Page 3 The New Intel Core™ i7 and Simulations Page 5