Intel Core I7 Performance Analysis Reviewed

Yesterday Hugo gave us an in-depth analysis of what lies at the heart of Intel’s new Core i7 (Nehalem) CPUs, which will be hitting high street shelves in just a few short weeks. Of course, that was all very interesting but no-one’s going to buy a CPU based on just the science. All that theory has got to hold up to real-world testing so, without further ado, let’s have a look at the numbers.

OK, I lied. There is a little bit more ‘ado’. Before we jump straight into the graphs, I would like to set out what our goals were for testing. For a start, it’s worth pointing out that, while these Core i7 CPUs will come to be used for all manner of different tasks, they are not server chips so we won’t be looking at performance in server oriented tasks. Likewise, we’re a consumer oriented site so we feel looking at things like theoretical memory bandwidth and raw integer calculation will be somewhat meaningless for most of you.

Instead, we’ve put together a selection of ‘real-world’ applications that we feel are reflective of the sorts of tasks a desktop CPU would be asked to do. Admittedly there are some ‘canned’ benchmarks in the form of the 3D rendering tests, Cinebench and POV-Ray. However, these are industry standard benchmarks that we feel people value, as they can easily be downloaded and run by anyone.

For comparison we’ve used Intel’s previous top-dog CPU, the QX9770. This still retails for over £1,000 and is unquestionably the fastest desktop CPU currently available. So if the new i7s can beat that chip, they can beat anything. We’ve also thrown in AMD’s Phenom 9950 Black Edition. Although this won’t offer much competition to Intel’s latest in terms of performance, considering its price it’s worth taking a look at how it shapes up.

Our final testing consideration was that of the i7s integrated triple channel memory controller. It has long been known that running your memory in dual-channel mode – whether an AMD system or Intel system – has a performance benefit. So, with i7 using a triple-channel controller, we also wanted to test whether we could see a real-world performance difference by running our system with three sticks of memory. Now, obviously, this isn’t an absolutely controlled test as the simple act of increasing our test bed’s memory quota from 2GB to 3GB could have some performance impact, regardless of whether that 3GB is configured in three-channel mode or not. Nevertheless, we’ve thrown in the numbers for a quick and dirty test.

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