Part 1: The Intel Core i7 920 CPU

At the heart of the beast, we selected the new Core i7 920. Selecting this component was the key to picking each individual piece of hardware in the $3000 build. The price tag on this particular CPU was about a 100 dollar difference than the core 2 duo of last month, thus resulting in duress: a higher priced motherboard than the DFIX38 that was chosen before at a cost of 75 dollars more. Thus making the Core i7 920 have to show us some serious results.

Now, our crew here realizes that the Nahalem should beat the core 2 in a 1v1 shootout, however don't forget that the E8500 has a clockspeed of 3.16 comparitive to the i7's 2.66Ghz.

Albeit, the Nahalem utilitizes four processor cores, while the E8500 utilitzes only 2. When it comes to multithreaded applications, obviously yet again... The i7 920 would walk away victorious. Partly because it has 8 MB of L3 cache, comparitive to the E8500’s 6 MB of L2, which would help in certain situations.

An interesting endeavor would be overclocking of the i7, having little experiance working with the quad core. On the other hand, the E8500 was able to achieve a bench past 4Ghz easily with the only inhibitor being the cpu cooler. Is it possible for the i7 to get better benchmarks utilizing the stock cpu fan?

Building a Monster for $1300

The Intel's Core i7 project: Nehalem has debut, but is it marketable cost effectively? As always, Upon release the price tag is all but subtle however; the i7 920 processor may have a few tricks up its sleeve. This Processor has enormous overclocking potential. Would the extra cost be worth the gain in performance?

The Proving grounds have arrived. In the Previous month, we unleashed a $1300 gamer PC based on the X38 platform utilizing an E8500 CPU and combined with AMD’s flagship Radeon 4870 X2 card and got amazing performance. However by switching to the Radeon 4850 X2 we were able to maintaine our budget without a major sacrifice in results.

Maintaining a similar budget while using the X58 platform and Core i7 CPU was not a very easy task, so how did we do it? By downgrading the video to a similar yet older Video Card. Besides that we were able to use the stock cpu fan rather than a luxry aftermarket cooler. The Xigmatek HDTS1283 was last month’s choice for the project.

Order of The Day...

I would like to send a huge RLabsPC Thank You to Cera and the software development team for their recent purchase of 15 Gaming Desktop PCs. They were absolutely sickening... and building them was my pleasure.

The stats were as follows:

• Quad Core Intel Q8200 Processor
• 4gb PC10600 DDR3 Corsairs Ram [dual channel configuration]
• 320gb 16mb Sata Western Digital Caviar Hard Drive
• 768mb Nvidia PCI-Express Video Card

... Should be everything they asked for. And Wow! I was jealous.

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Happy Holidays, and for now... It's goodnight.

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