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?