Hardware Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Review

I think you missed my point somewhat. I wasnt referring to AMD Vs Intel arguments or suggesteing AMD is a competitor for Intel right now. I was discussing the merits of a £800+ CPU and any 'real world' benefits it has over something costing over £600 less, whether that be an Intel or AMD CPU. The cinebench scores and multitasking stuff look very impressive but when it comes to everyday use (wake up, turn on PC, check email, browse p0rn, play Crysis [or whatever game you happen to be playing]) whats the performance increase and does it justify that kind of money - once you take bragging rights out of the equation.

 

4.72GHz is the highest we got with standard water-cooling - you'll have to read the next issue of Custom PC to see how much further I pushed it with something a little bit more exotic

 

yet another piece of hardware i will never own! nice chip though

 

veato you missed the point yourself. It may be a general consumer cpu but its really still based around a workstation user who actually runs 100s of things at once and has programs that use 8-12 threads to maximise performance

this isnt a 930 vs 955 compition.

Real world for you is check email **** and play crysis or another game.

Real world for those who this is aimed at is

Turn on pc check email load up sony vegas ( uses 100% of most 8 thread cpus and is 12 threadable) then move into adobe preimier edition and start editing ( once again this uses up alot of processing power) then you render it with say cinima 4d rendering. even Winrar uses every single core that you have avail. if your into your folding it uses every power it can get at.

Video and music creators this is a wet dream for them. Those who heavy multitask. 10-20 firefox windows lots of msn chat vent irc games running in background music will also see performance gains from such a cpu.

Most data analyst run a program called SPSS Data Collector which is another highly threaded app.

Games have once again reached the point were the cpu isnt the block to performance. Its still the graphics card. and i dout the 480x or whatever nvidia calls it will change that much. I dout we will ever see the day when games take and use all threads avail from even a quadcore cpu ( 8 threads) theres games that use 4 threads now a days but they are just splitting the workload.

 

bad lizard ill have to buy it now

 

I would love to see some smp folding screen shots running 4.7 using hfm.net 30K+ a day?

 

Shocking review. Bit's been looking a bit Intel biased for a while now, but this just takes the cheesecake. The first paragraph sets the tone nicely:

Ahem:AMD Begins Revenue Shipments of Twelve Core Opteron Microprocessors

I've noticed yet another example of AMD being handicapped in your benches: Why on earth is the AMD setup not using the same RAM as the Intel rig? - It's not even the same spec (Cas 9 vs 7) and also likely to be older, 1.65v sticks against LV Blades(1.35v?). Mind you, even that didn't help hide theunbelievable power consumption of the 980X when overclocked.

There's also no mention of how a ~£120 Phenom 965 comes within 5 or 6 fps of this new wunder chip in Crysis. (Although this is likely due to benching a 5870 at 1680x1050 4xAA, rather than using a 5970, where more of a difference may have been seen)

Final insult:
- Giving the beast an Excellence award. That pretty much goes against the Bit-Tech scoring guide:

- I'm not quite sure how an average score of 8.5, which is then rounded up to 9 could be classed as 'very close to receiving an overall score of ten.'
In fact, the conclusion sounds more like the criteria for a 7/10:

Review:

/END RANT

 

Erm... no I didnt miss the point. As the chip has been benchmarked against other consumer chips on games performance that is what I based my comments on i.e. the review. My conclusion is that there is no 'real world' gain for the new chip over some of the much cheaper models in this respect. Hence I would agree (although didnt state) its more suited to the worksation environment.

 

LMAO at the new string on MAD sorry AMD fanboys taking a dig at Bit-Tech for doing a decent review that doesn't favour their product choice.

If you don't like the results then go off to one of your fangirl forums which I'm sure in a utopia of all things amd/ati where no other manufacturer exists and every benchtest says you are very good looking and the world around you is perfect in every way.

 

All right you two, calm down! You both agree that this is an excellent CPU for workstation/heavily multi-threaded apps, but isn't an obvious choice if all you do is play games which are GPU-limited (as our Crysis testing was, even with a HD 5870!).

Now shake hands!

 

I think you and I both know playing Crysis isn't the intended use of this CPU for anyone who is considering buying it. If you just wanted something to play Crysis, you'd be paying £700 less.

The overall score isn't an average, which you would also have learned if you read the score guide properly. Perhaps you'd like to direct me to something that performs as well as this CPU for less, which would justify a lower score?

AMD fanboyism isn't any better than Intel fanboyism, you know.

 

oh, my, god! that is fast.

when will these 32nm hit high end consumer desktop? eg. 32nm i7 quad core at affordable price.

 

I dont think anyone is behaving like a fanboy of AMD - sure everyone is impressed by the performance of the new intel offering - especialy considering the step up from their previous performance offering.

It is notable however how cpu is not the limit in these games tests, perhaps with other tests on other games we'd see the difference - similarly if the cpu laod were shown we'd have an understanding of the ehadroom we have for future games....

 

beast.

rawr.


(beast as in itll eat my savings before i can say "wowthatsfast")

great technology. good for marketing and PR. not gonna b a huge sales force tho.

 

Looks like you need to be updating the cpu test sytem to an SSD to fully show off the differences in performance for the IO intensive tasks as the disk access now looks like it's getting to be the limiting factor!

 

It's an impressive piece of kit, just not very good value for money if you are the typical home user. An i7 930 system is something i am seriously considering buying at the end of the month though.

Plus i'm sick of the same people (or rather person) crying 'fanboy' every time someone dares to have a different opinion on something. You need to have a look at your own posts really.

 

If you get 60+ FPS or above on any game. Does it really matter after that?

 

You lot seem to have quite short memories...remember the Q6600 was about £600 when it came out, so £800 plus for this level of performance seems quite reasonable (if you've got a spare kidney to sell). It may not drop that much in price , but it's gotta be top of every 1's wish list... at least until the next big thing hits the market

 

Damn. 4.7GHz hexa-core? I have got to get me one of those. Just wait for the student loan to come through...

 

You are right. The only difference is most people bought the Q6600 when it dropped to under £200 (like me )