News Intel Core i7-950 Review

Thanks for the review bit-tech. A good buddy of mine has been looking at the Core i7 950 for a while now, and after contemplating the platform longevity of LGA 1366, he's ready to buy into one. So we're heading over to the Micro Center in Southern California tomorrow afternoon to pick up this chip and install it on his MSI X58 Pro-E. Thanks again for the review, and I'll make sure to keep the QPI limit in mind when overclocking tomorrow evening! \m/

 

My i7 920 wasn't too hard to get to 4Ghz (it's really W/C) - but I am not interested in going in higher
Did have to change waterblocks - damn that thing runs hot when loaded @4Ghz!

 

First question.

Is speedstep enabled on any of those machines?

are the Idle power consumptions numbers really taken with it idling at 4+ Ghz?


The reason I ask is my current 920 is at 3.6 at 1.2vcore and with speedstep enabled it idles at 2.2ghz.
As soon as I add a second fan to my TRUE I will go for a nice even 4Ghz hopefully I can do it at 1.25vcore or 1.3 at the max. I would like to have my memory running at its rated speed its currently at 1440 with this overclock.

I also plan to go up to 12gb's in the machine which I know will also affect my overclocks slightly so interestingt times ahead come christmas.

 

Same here for me until I get more Sandy Bridge info, if Sandy Bridge doesn't blow me away or cost too much then a Core i7 950 will work just fine in my new build.

 

Want to get my 920 to 4GHz, but this sabertooth boards options are so vast I'm not sure where to start. Also, my dominator ram doesnt appear to be able to run at its XMP settings

 

You may need to update your mobo's bios. Is it a Corsair SSD?

 

My findings are that the 950 is inferior to the 930. 930s generally clock to 4GHz with no problems. Since the 950 dropped in I've been struggling to hit 4GHz consistently on anything but the RIIIE. My theory is that it's board designers tuning for the 930 and 32nm variants. Hopefully there will be a flurry of BIOS updates that improve the stability of overclocked 950s or the 930 quality chips will start being sold as 950s and the problem will go away.

 

No, sadly they all seem to be this way, hopefully it'll pass.

 

Did the "Turbo-boost" work this time?
I recall in the last test, it never clocked up more than one step (out of what...4?5?)

 

Might be a bit late in the day but mine works just fine at 4.2GHz with only 1.29v with a bus speed of 200MHz x 21 in an Asus Rampage III Extreme.