| Soleron said: To bad you can buy an E8600 dual-core for the same price, saving $50 on the RAM by not having to use 6GB DDR3 but using 4GB DDR2, and saving over $100 on the motherboard by using P45 rather than X58, keep everything else the same, and guess what? It owns your system in gaming benchmarks while being $100-200 cheaper depending on motherboard. |
It does win in pre i7 games that were in no way optimized for i7, I would bet you newer i7 optimized games like empire total war will give results more in line with the non game based tests (the ones at the start where all i7s dominated). Also you are forgetting the i7 is a much more efficient and VERY easily OCable chip. You can, with no special hard ware, get the i7 running at 3.5 Ghz with no problems at all. When doing high end air cooling several OC sites were pulling 4.0 Ghz numbers off the 2.66 i7 chip which is pretty nuts.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-phenom-ii,2119.html
Yes you can get old tech and it will be cheaper, that is always the case, but in future games the huge gains the i7 makes in performance and architecture will more then make it a worthwhile value. Also if you OCed the i7 even moderately that advantage your E8600 enjoys (which is nowhere near as OCable) evaporates even now.
Most of the benchmarks in your test were also relatively low settings and low end games. In higher end applications where the GPU and CPU need to work together to render the increase in i7 performance matters a whole lot more. Look how the 3.2 i7 performs even on those low end tests, the 2.66 version can get to 3.2 without breaking a sweat.
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