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
Not no more power, negligibly more power.Anyway does the turbo mode not increase clock speed? Oh wow. Guess they have some way to beat P = C * F * V^2?
Inkie - Sunday, September 13, 2009 - link
I suppose it's what you mean by 'negligible' then. That carries a diferent connotation for processors than it does nuclear power stations.Yes, turbo mode increases clock speed on the cores in question. What is the point you want to make? It is all done within the specifications of the processor. It's just a clever application of the idea that if all the cores are not working hard then there is room to clock some of the cores higher. If you want to call that clever overclocking then you can, but what most people mean by overclocking is exceeding the specifications of the processor.
Alkapwn - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Begone, foul demon of misinformation and bias, begone.Alkapwn - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
The prior was @ snakeoil.jonup - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
A dynamic OC which does not change the thermal envelop. 965BE has 140W TDP at stock. When you overclock the the thermal envelop skyrockets, putting extraordinary presure on the power circatery. Turbo does not do that. Yes, it increases the clock of the individual cores, but does not put additional pressure on the system, it is the default setting, it is not user-initiated. It is the stock clock. It just varies. The clock is not set in stone. If I go and change internal clock then it is OC. It is over the clock it was meant to be.avaughan - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Jon Stokes at Ars Technica noticed something odd in the last graph at http://techreport.com/articles.x/17545/6">http://techreport.com/articles.x/17545/6 . Basically Far Cry 2 at 1600x1200 4xAA is GPU limited (expected), but the Phenon II x4s and Core 2 Quads all converge on a frame rate that's approx 10 fps higher than the i5-750/i7-870 (unexpected).The E8600 even beats the i7-975 at 1600x1200 4xAA, even though Far Cry 2 is obviously cpu limited at lower resolutions.
Any chance you guys could try to reproduce/investigate that, and look at single gpu resolution scaling to at leats 1920x1200.
I know that's the sort of thing you mainly look at with new chipsets, but with the northbridge and cpu merging i5/i7-8xx is effectively a new chipset.
Gary Key - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
I have spent the better part of the last twenty four hours trying to figure out our FarCry 2 numbers and it also happens in other games by the way. ;) The only conclusion I have right now is that with the latest NV drivers, Win7, and certain games, the Phenom II 965 is faster now.Not only against Lynnfield but also against Bloomfield in the tests we utilize for the motherboards. The CPU oriented action test we use in the processor benchmarks tells another story. So something is happening along the graphics path at this point, what exactly is something we are trying to isolate.
avaughan - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Ah thanks. Good to know that you're looking into it. Does it seem to happen in many games, and is it limited to NVidia cards + win 7 only?Since you can reproduce it, it's probably a good idea to make a note/show some benchmarks demonstrating it in an article soon, before too many people start replacing their existing Phenom II/Core 2 Quads looking for better framerates at high resolutions.
Hlafordlaes - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
After reading this update and the comments, I went back to peruse the comments on the launch article. Ugly!Granted, there is something to be said for improving comparisons at equal clocks, etc., but I can't help but get the feeling we are ignoring the writing on the wall. In short, the desktop PC (not servers or workstations) is rapidly going the way of the dodo. The last remaining performance-demanding app on the PC is gaming, and PC gaming is dying in its present form.
So the home PC trend is toward a console/nettop in the living room and maybe a NAS for local storage, synch services for phones and note/netbooks, tied to cloud backup. The P55 platform is a clear step in the direction of SOC, enabling Intel to stay relevant eventually in the living room (notice the high % of uATX boards, too). When and if Larrabee comes into play as a competitive graphics player, we might see an eventual renaissance of PC gaming, but on what has virtually become an Intel console, not a desktop. This is why P55 makes sense to me; it forks the market so that X58 and so on forms the backbone of servers and workstations, and P55 drives in the direction of consoles.
Unfortunately for NVidia, I do not see a space for them in the midterm, barring some miracle alignment of the stars.
darkos - Friday, September 11, 2009 - link
Microsoft Flight Simulator is a great tool for testing these multi-core setups. The latest service pack includes the ability to use multiple threads, and has support for both DX9 and DX10.There are many flight sim people out here that want to know how these systems will fare with FSX and x-plane.