Hardware Intel Lynnfield Core i5-750 & Core i7-860, i7-870

Yeah I think I may buy it now and get the rest of the components at a later date. Not like it is going to be replaced by a better or cheaper processor so I am should be safe!

 

Still not leaving my Q6600... That's a really good CPU for a great price, but for everyone that has a QCore, I don't think it's that important, I just OC'ed my Q6600 to 3.2Ghz without volting up, and I think I'll have a good performance on games for at least 1-2 years until I switch to Sandybridge (or something else). It's a good buy for people with single cores, and "small" dual-cores, nothing more

 

ebuyer have P55 boards starting from £86.45, so does that make the i5 a good deal? Im going to try and get a 'cheap' MSI board if i dont i may just go 920 instead.

 

Hmm, the only thing that worries me is the price of the future 1366 CPUs. If Intel is going to discontinue the 920 then that only leaves the high end CPUs which are £400+, and I doubt I'll ever spend that much on a CPU. Intel's silly pricing scheme may only be silly for now, until they make 1366 too expensive for people like me and the only "affordable" i7s (i.e. the 860) will be released on 1156.

Of course I could be completely wrong, but it's a worry nonetheless and the lack of transparency from Intel regarding their intentions for each socket doesn't help.

 

As the review says - until we've tested and seen proven whether such boards are any good the answers's still no.

 

Possibly, but without testing the cheap i5 boards, we can't really make a recommendation ourselves - it's up to you to decide whether it's worth buying a fairly cheap board blind. That said, we have a bunch of cheaper boards arriving (some have already) and we hope to turn around the reviews as quickly as possible - it might be worth waiting for the dust to settle.

 

That also worries me if i go down the i7 920 route now the chances of being able to upgrade look pretty slim. 1366 will become the ultimate high end leaving me with nowhere to go from my 920, Where as if i go 1156 i can have an i5 now and upgrade to a i7 if i wanted in the future.

 

We think the i7-920 is the 'new' Q6600 (if there is such a thing), in that you shouldn't need to upgrade it for the foreseeable future if you don't mind a bit of overclocking, but it won't be around forever according to the roadmaps we've seen... hence the recommendation to buy it while you still can.

 

Agreed, my work PC is a Q6600 which I also do some casual gaming on and I am more than happy with it, I think it would be a waste of money to upgrade from that at this moment in time.

Unfortunately at home I am running a 939 AMD X2 4400, while it is ok on day to day tasks gaming has become quite sluggish on it!

 

Yes I did. I'm done with overclocking for now. I am hoping that the 860 comes out at the $230 price range like quoted on other sites, but I am waiting on newegg at the moment.
I've had my eye set on the P55 SLI from EVGA for a while ($200)
So thats $430 compared to the $520 I would spend on a similar setup.
I won't have to spend another $50 on a cpu cooler since the P55 SLI has LGA775 mounts, and I will only have to buy 2 stick of Ram off the bat instead of 3.

 

Bloody Intel...

I guess I was hoping that the low end i5 would be basically an i920 in desquise for less, instead, its just an over priced bit of silicone.. Oh well, I guess I'll be buying a 2nd hand e8400 etc. to pass the years instead then..

 

I'll stick to my over-clocked Core2 and 775 motherboard; a nice GeForce "395" (dual Gt300) will give a blast to the majority of this "11XX" "i7": And frankly, till the majority manages to really take advantage of 920's SLI dual "395" option (because of the price) we will have something completely new on the market.

In other words, Intel is not going to see my money for a while.

 

I found out yesterday when I was doing some overclocking together with my brother that running two Nvidia cards in SLI is slower then decoupling the cards and use one as a GPU and one as a physics GPU. We don't know why but we got higher numbers in vantage then with SLI.

 

now that Intel have released the data sheet on these processors, what is interesting is that i7 920 have thermal spec of 68c. while all LGA1156 processors have thermal spec of 73c.


does this mean as long as the temperature stay below 72c on i5's, it will turbo boost when single thread is needed?

is that how turbo boost works? i plan to overclock my 750 to 3.8Ghz at 190 Bclk, then take advantage of turbo boost in single threaded applications to achieve speed pass 4Ghz.

 

Are we forgetting that there is going to be 55% off of MSI boards etc from all of the retailers out there as of 2pm today until they are sold? This makes the £130 boards that bit-tech are testing these chips on around £60-65. That then brings down the price of a system to (i5 750, a £65 mobo, 4gb ram) £300. Not the £480+ of the 920 with equivalent motherboard and 6gb of ram. That makes the 750 an absolute bargain and even brings the 860 into the equation HOWEVER when prices go back up it becomes one of those scenarios where you cant help but um' and ah'.

Andy

 

Each of the 4 companies that I know are partaking in the offer only have 40 of the boards, so the chance of you getting one is pretty so damn slim, its not worth thinking you will get one for £65..

 

Phew...
Great write up as always.

Sooooo pleased i bought my 920 last week...

 

I am very intrigued to now see the September Buyers Guide!

 

I'm still sat here with a heavily overclocked E4300, I don't see the point in upgrading...... yet

 

<me hugs my i7-920>


Great review. Pity you couldn't have incorporated a SLI graphics test into it to show differences in scaling.... I'm really interested in seeing that when you've finished!

All this talk of the possible astronomical prices of 1366 upgrades doesn't bother me. I know this chip will do over 4.5GHz on water. I'll just upgrade my cooling system instead I think the other poster is right. The i7-920 is the new Q6600.

Interesting results with HT! As image editing is one of my main tasks, I'll be doing some tests to see how Photoshop performs with and without it.

Why use Gimp to test image editing performance? This has been annoying me for a while now. I know of not a single photographer or graphics artist who uses Gimp. How about using Photoshop please? After all... probably over 90% of people who would actually consider image editing performance as a buying factor will NOT be using Gimp.. trust me.. they wont.


Other than that... fantastic review. Not a complete surprise due to Wuyanxu publishing benchmarks before the NDA.. he he...


No idea why there's a fuss about Turbo Boost2.. it's great for people who run it stock out of the box (mainstream end users) but I think everyone on here will be OCing (or most anyway) and to me, Speedstep is way more important. Does Lynnfield still have that? You just OC to the max, and let speedstep throttle it back when idle. Makes far more sense (Me looks at my 2.4GHz clock speed and 47watts while typing this). Turbo Boost will be disabled by most in short order I think.