Intel Core i7 920 and 965 review

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay.

The game itself looks great and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version. There are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer.
For instance, aluminum cans litter the street and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound that may betray your presence to the enemy.

And here are the results done with the newer GRAW2. Image Quality settings:

• Edge Smoothing Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Dynamic shadows HIGH

Observe 10x7 closely, here we have a title that is way more CPU dependant while the GPU laughs at the title. Look at the dual core E8500, then the QX9770 and then both i7's. That is pretty significant. We'll have a larger amount of gaming benchmarks in our X58 review though.

But really ... not at all massively intersting for an upgarde eh ? This is why today we'll also launch a seperate and very extensibe Multi-GPU article. Let me show you a quick taste of our multy-GPU article then:

Far Cry 2 3-way SLI (3 GPUs - 3 Cards)

Seriously my eyes almost popped out when I noticed the results here. This is 3-way SLI, GeForce GXT 280.

In blue our current Core 2 Duo test platform (3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo - 2GB EPP 1066MHz memory - nForce) which is really a very current and fast eco-system to work with. The game is far Cry 2 at high Image Qaility setting with 4xAA.

In green the same three GTX 280 cards on the Core i7 965 - X58 system. to notice this much of a difference is just insane. 

This is the reality you guys, the processor will shine where it can. Yet you'll need multi-GPU based configurations to be able to actually see the processor take an effect; Well, that or much faster high-end graphics cards. Anyway, this was just a tast of our other 'Multi-GPU' article where we'll show you 2-way, 3-way and 4-way SCLi/Crossfire performance on Core i7.
 

Power consumption

Alright then, let's monitor something besides performance... power consumption.

With a TDP of 130W the peak power consumption of the Core i7 is a little high, and that shows when we start to stress the four CPU cores. Overall IDLE consumption however is pretty nice. The i7 will clock down towards 1600 MHz, differing per processor. Preserving a lot of energy.