Core i7 Test System

CPU: Intel Core i7 975 XE (D0 Stepping Engineering Sample)

CPU (For Comparison): Intel Core i7 965 XE (C0/C1 Stepping Engineering Sample)

Motherboard: GIGABYTE X58 Extreme Mainboard (BIOS Version F5)

Memory: 6GB Qimonda Aneon DDR3 1600 (CL9) Kingston DDR3 1600 (CL9) for overclocking

Graphics Card(s): 2x Zotac GTX 280 AMP! Edition 1GB GDDR3 GPUs (in SLI)

Storage: LSI MegaRAID w/ 2x Seagate Cheetah 15k RPM 147GB SAS Drives (RAID 0)

Power Supply:Cooler Master UCP 1100

Cooling: Swiftech H20 220 Apex Ultima Kit (with Apogee GTZ for i7)

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840 Enclosure

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate RC1

For testing we ran a couple of new tests and of course there's also the regular ones you are used to.

For our new tests we brought in two new synthetics and two real-world tests. The new synthetics are HyperPi 0.99b and CINEBENCH R10 x64.

Our two new real-world tests are Lightwave 3D 9.3 x64 and AutoGK for video transcoding. We also changed the in-game tests with frame rates measured by FRAPS at typical gaming resolutions and settings.

Let's now dive in and see what the new i7 can do.

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage

Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

Although gaming has become more and more GPU dependant, we still see the CPU having an impact in the realm of physics (if you do not have NVIDIA card in your system). The CPU also plays a role with AI and positional audio in some cases.

3DMark Vantage tests the CPU for its ability to properly run these types of codes inside the gaming context and here we see that the i7 975 has the upper hand right off the bat. When we overclocked it to 4.183 GHz it simply walks away.