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Soleron on 10 March 2009
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Impulsivity said:
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.

WTF? Optimised for i7? Games are NOT optimised for different CPUs (it does happen with GPUs due to drivers). On CPUs, as long as the instruction set remains the same (which Penryn -> i7 did), it runs the same code on all chips. So performance won't increase at all in the long run; ask Intel and they will say the same.

Sure, you can OC an i7. 3.5GHz with realistic cooling. But you can OC an E8600 to 4.0GHz with the same cooling, and it will be just as stable and still faster. The E8600 is more OC-able than i7, due to

Yes, the reason those benchmarks were at low-res was to seperate out CPUs. Any higher, and it would gave been entirely GPU-limited, giving the same perf regardless of CPU - an argument against ALL high-end CPUs, in fact a cheap E7xxx runs all modern games at max res good enough anyway. The i7 does NOT stand out or improve against the E8600 as you change the resolution.