This article is more than 1 year old

Intel Core i5-750 and Core i7-870

'Lynnfield' performance figures are go

At standard clock speed, the QX9650 sets a decent standard but it was beaten in most of the benchmarks by the i7-940. The i7-870 takes things a step further and trounced the i7-940 in every test, presumably thanks to the enhanced Turbo Boost and despite the reduced memory bandwidth.

More impressively, this extra performance is delivered with a power draw that is 40W less than the i7-940 consumes.

Power Draw
Windows

Intel Lynnfield

Power Draw in Watts (W)

POVRay

Intel Lynnfield

Power Draw in Watts (W)

The comparison at standard clock speed was fairly straightforward but matters became more complicated when we started overclocking. The first candidate was QX9650. We disabled SpeedStep, increased the CPU core voltage by 0.2V and cranked up the frontside bus from 333MHz to 420MHz to give a clock speed of 3.78GHz.

Next, we moved on to Core i7-940. Again, we disabled SpeedStep and increased the QPI voltage by a hefty percentage from 1.1V to 1.5V. With that done, we could raise the base clock from 133MHz to 160MHz to give a clock speed of 3.53GHz. That’s fairly unimpressive as we have regularly achieved clock speeds of 3.8GHz and 3.9GHz with the i7 920.

Our 3.53GHz Core i7 had performance that was almost identical to the 3.78GHz QX9650 with the exception of DivX 7 recoding as Core i7 supports SSE 4.2 which gives it an advantage over the Core 2's SSE 4.0.

Next page: Verdict

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like