Core i5 / P55 Lab Update
by Gary Key on September 11, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gary's First Looks
This has been an interesting week to say the least for those of us stuck in the labs and not at AMD's DX11 GPU press briefings. Based on feedback from the Lynnfield launch article we have spent the last couple of days running additional benchmarks to address overclocking and clock for clock requests. Yes, we do listen and respond to the comments no matter how outlandish (you know who you are) some may be at times.
I will interject a personal note here, the emails/private messages that outlined a strong case for additional research and testing certainly held a lot more weight than comments like "You are on Intel's payroll...", "Worst review ever...", and the moonshot , "Illegal benchmarking methods..". First off, if we were on Intel's payroll we would not be working here (a logical conclusion, right? ;) ) As for the other comments, everyone is entitled to their opinions. We do our best to keep an open forum and let the comments fall where they may, but offering constructive criticism and facts to back up those comments is what actually causes change, not endless shock posts or attention grabbing statements. I still have hope in people abiding by the rules of Internet Etiquette, but apparently we are still a long ways off from that happening. I will step off the soap box, well, until the next article....
Just to set this up now, our overclock comparisons will be at 3.8GHz for the Core i5/i7 and Phenom II x4 965BE processors. Why 3.8GHz, well it is an easy number for all of our processors to hit on fairly low voltages with retail or mid-range air coolers. It is also an ideal clock range for the "set it and forget crowd" interested in 24/7 overclocking. Certainly we could go higher on air or water cooling and actually ran most of our Core i5/i7 numbers at 4.2GHz for the motherboard roundups. Our Phenom II x4 965BE is the hold up for higher numbers in our clock for clock comparisons.
AMD continues to have serious problems with their Phenom II processor range clocking above 3.8~4GHz on air with a 64-bit operating system. Unfortunately, there is nothing AMD can do to correct this in the current stepping, but they are actively working on improvements with each processor release. In fact, the latest Athlon II x2 processors are the first products we have that allow for 24/7 stable operation at 4GHz under Windows 7 x64. The quad cores are still lagging although our latest retail 965BE is showing promise around 3.92GHz in early testing. I state this now so it does not come as surprise later.
I will post several benchmark results later today based on our motherboard test suite. Anand will provide a more in-depth analysis next week along with an updated look at the Core i7/860. He might even have a surprise announcement from AMD. In the meantime, I have just about completed this additional testing and will return my focus on completing the first (of many) P55 motherboard article(s) that will be up in a couple of days. Our first review will cover the Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 among others. We recently received several other micro-ATX P55 motherboards and will look at those shortly. For now, this board is a perfect match for the Core i5/750 for our mainstream audience looking to upgrade an older platform.
Our graph below is an example of the information we will provide late today. Hopefully, this type of information will be useful for your purchasing decision along with our commentary about the results. I know there is not a Core 2 product listed, that will be forthcoming in the near future.
9/11 Update - I am still working on the FarCry 2 and H.A.W.X. benchmarks so the short update will be delayed until tomorrow morning.
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Ann3x - Sunday, September 13, 2009 - link
Anyone who knows how to overclock?Anyone with SLI?
Anyone with CF?
Anyone with a PCI-E Raid array
Can you think of any good reason (apart from ineptitude, laziness etc) why these people would choose anything BUT a 920?
TGressus - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
It really boils down to the target markets. In the consumer space, the 1366 platform is a luxury and 1156 has proven worth the wait. That being said it was marketing genius to put out the top gun platform first and bilk the early adopters.I commend the earlier poster for identifying his present needs, and contrasting that with the relatively short tick-tock production cycle Intel pursues. Any kind of long term investment in a desktop Intel chipset is a financial mistake now, and a technological mistake in 18 months.
Other market space could be interpreted differently...
has407 - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Because it's the cheapest entry point for LGA1366/X58, which allows for a wider upgrade path than LGA1156/P55. E.g., memory (24GB vs. 16GB); ECC (possible vs. never); cores (6-8 vs. 4); PCIe lanes (36 in various flavors vs. 24 in few flavors).Is that potential upgrade path worth the premium? Depends. If you're looking at longer term system-level price/performance, then arguably yes. I was waiting to see what the new parts offered before making a decision on building a new home server, and for me LGA1366/X58--at the cheapest I can get into it, which means a Core i7 920--is still attractive.
erple2 - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
Curiously, I thought that too. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that they're not really points at all. I've had this Core2Duo since 2007, and it's performed exceptionally well for what I've wanted it to do. Now that I feel that I may want to "upgrade", my options are Core2Quad, 1156 or 1366. Well, The Core2Quad is more or less "useless" right now, given how well even the 1156 runs. So having the chipset (in my case, a P35) upgraded means nothing to me.So now I look at upgrade time (it's been 2 years, so I figure it's about that time again). So my choices are the 1156 or the 1366. Do I really think that I'm going to need more than 8 gigs of RAM right now? No, I doubt it. And that's on the cheap side. I figure that when I'll need more than 8 gigs of RAM (12, 16 or 24 gigs), a 4 Gig stick of DDR3 will be "cheap enough" to be palatable. So the real question is, will I need more than 16 gigs of RAM? I honestly can't imagine needing to more than quadruple my current memory usage. I don't even use the 4 gigs that I have now. I think that I'd be happy with 2 gigs, now that I think about it.
So, "future proof" I think is a bit of a misnomer. How long can we reasonably expect the 1366 to be relevant in the Market place? My old P4 was one of the socket 478 chips. The "upgrade" for that ended with the P4, 3.06 GHz (with hyperthreading). Needless to say, it wasn't worthwhile for me to actually spend money on the CPU upgrade. I'd question the logic of making a "future proof" decision, at least based on CPU capabilities.
The possibility of 6 cores or 8 cores might be interesting. It might be interesting if we had a significant share of applications that took advantage of more than 4 cores (or 8 "virtual" ones). I don't have any that are appreciably good at that. Most of those (video encoding) will still be stunningly faster when run over a GPGPU calculation (you can't beat 800 stream processors, or whatever NVidia has right now).
That leaves just the PCIe 2 * 8x or 2 * 16x issue. I don't run dual graphics cards, so that option isn't very useful to me either. The idea sounded good that I could, in the future, buy a second card when my single card "got slow". However, I'd just as soon buy a nice, new card that performed on par with the 2x cards, so that buys me nothing. Particularly given that finding the same card would be harder to find since either the company has re-spun a new rev of the cards that aren't 100% compatible in SLI or Crossfire, or that they're just not made any more. So the cost of the card wouldn't be that much cheaper.
I dunno. I always thought that "future proofing" a purchase sounded good. However, I've honestly never actually taken advantage of that. When things get too slow (and more RAM thrown at it doesn't solve the problem), I usually just buy the new big 2 (CPU which usually begets a new chipset, hence also buying a new MoBo). Every now and then, I can use the RAM from one base computer to the next.
95thRifles - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Appreciate the effort,any chance of maybe some old scores from a C2Q maybe even C2D etc for some comparisons, to see if it would be worth people updating their existing systems?ClagMaster - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
I second that motion. I too appreciate the efforts.I would like to see some PCMark and 3DMark scores for an E6600 and a Q6600 included in these reviews so I can see how they compare to i5 and i7 LGA 1156 processors. Many of us mainstream people will be upgraded from these processors and want to know if its worth it. If that does not happen, then the only other alternative is to visit Toms Hardware CPU charts and scale with the i7 920.
Gary Key - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Sometime between midnight and four am I plan on running a C2Q system for comparison. :) That delay is my fault. We had only planned on showing the P55 and X58 board results in the initial motherboard articles. We added the 790FX/965BE earlier this week and now if everything works out properly, we will have a P45/C2Q setup in the motherboard articles based on a large number of requests. However, for a quick CPU comparison, check out the Lynnfield launch article.yacoub - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Gary, you are a huge part of what makes this site the valuable resource it is. Thanks for going the extra mile to make it comprehensive.justme2009 - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
"I will interject a personal note here, the emails/private messages that outlined a strong case for additional research and testing certainly held a lot more weight than comments like "You are Intel's payroll...", "Worst review ever...", and the moonshot , "Illegal benchmarking methods..". First off, if we were on Intel's payroll we would not be working here (a logical conclusion right? ;) ) As for the other comments, everyone is entitled to their opinions. We do our best to keep an open forum and let the comments fall where they may, but offering constructive criticism and facts to back up those comments is what actually causes change, not endless shock posts or attention grabbing statements. I still have hope in people abiding by the rules of Internet Etiquette, but apparently we are still a long ways off from that happening. I will step off the soap box, well, until the next article...."Gary, being a popular website on the net, it goes with the territory. Atleast with Anandtech, you are open and entertain other people's suggestions and opinions. I think that sets you apart from the rest. Keep up the good work!
The comment I made about this latest processor is, it's not a big leap by any means, it's really nothing to write home about and I felt AT was overhyping it a bit. I think the bigger leap (as I said in the other article) will be mobile Nehalem and beyond, and that will be an article worth reading.
happyrock - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
I'm not sure if this will work here...but as a staff member at geeks 2 go we can set in our profile blocked posters ...people that we don't even see their posts...EVER...it would help keep the replies on topic or at a minimum not waste any time having to wade thru the BS posts by anyone we consider not worth reading anything they have to say...just my 2 cents worth...