New Super awesome sub 900 dollar i7 build

[Impulsivity]

Soleron said:

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.

 

 

   Games ARE optimized for new processors, especially multi core innovations and hyperthreading.

   Here's an example.  Until recently Everquest 2, an older MMO, only used one core no matter how many you had.  It was made when the Pentium 4 model was really the only model (you have one chip, get the Ghz as high as possible and that's that) and so never really had anything built in for multiple cores since only servers had such set ups.

   Recently, since almost everyone has a Core 2 or better by now, EQ2 uses multiple cores so you get much better performance with Core 2s and even better performance with Quad Cores and i7s.

   Now as to optimizing for i7, it only has a big boost if games can efficiently utilize up to 8 processing units instead of 2 or 4 (as is common for a lot of games made under the core 2 paradigm).  If whatever you're using can't use 8 Processing Units then the i7 won't give a huge boost over a chip with less multi thread support.  If I were to use Everquest 2 in the old version for instance it wouldn't matter whether I had a Core 2, a Quad Core or an i7, it would be functionally the same.

   Benchmarks DO use multiple cores to the fullest which is why the i7 blows away all the old style chips, what I'm saying is eventually games will catch up to benchmarks in that respect (will use all 8 processing units at the same time and have a big boost in performance).  Clearly if fully utilized the i7 is vastly superior to the old architecture, though that will be more the case going forward then looking backward.

  Also if you use the processor for anything other then straight gaming the i7 vs the old style quad cores isn't even much of a contest.  Using Premire for video editing the render time with the i7 (at the same 2.66 clock speed as my old 2.66 quad core) is about half what it was even with the same 8800GT GPU put back in.  The i7 is vastly faster, its not immaginarry, it just needs the software to catch up to the new hardware which it will.

  You're basically making the arguement "don't go with the core duo processor since no games use multiple cores anyway just get a faster pentium 4 for 100 bucks less", only you're making the arguement with a different change a few years later.