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Conclusion

The Intel Core i7 processors are a significant evolutionary step forward from their Core 2 predecessors.

In all but a couple of tests, the 2.66GHz Core i7 920 handily beats the 3.2GHz Core 2 Quad QX9770 - and in some tests by an embarrasing margin. Needless to say, the Core i7 965 tends to wipe the floor with the QX9770 in memory or processor bound applications, and I think that AMD is in for a nasty surprise on the server side - the memory bandwidth improvements and QPI will allow Intel to finally build multi-socket servers that outperform current AMD Opteron offerings - but who knows what Shanghai will bring to the table?

Overclocking will become more difficult with the i7 parts than the Core 2's - in the past, one could buy a Core 2 meant for a 1066MHz bus and get crazy overclocks by cranking the FSB to over 1600MHz - 50%-60% overclocks were quite doable with good cooling.

With the Core i7, except for the Extreme parts, the issue has become more complicated, as the balancing act between QPI, base clock and memory speed - with the limited QPI and memory multipliers - makes it tougher to achieve spectacular overclocks on the lower end parts. Overclockers may find that it will be necessary to migrate to mid-range parts at least in order to get high overclocks.

Fortunately, for gamers it does not really matter.

In high-resolution, high AA/AF and high texture resolution games, we will be GPU limited for the forseeable future. I added a lot of high resolution eye-candy game benchmarks to this review in order to see what difference it makes - and the fact is, it makes very little difference at the high resolutions, with high AA/AF. As long as you have a decent processor - and the Core i7 920, the lowest end i7, certainly qualifies as one - or even an E8500 - get a great GPU and frag away.

The situation is VERY different for multi-media professionals.

The transcoding and rendering speed of the i7's has to be seen to be believed. The rendering times blew me away - and the increase in speed to be had for transcoding from high performance SSD drives such as the Intel XM25 is also well worth considering. For multi-media, a Core i7 940 or Core i7 965 has the potential for quickly paying for itself.

Servers will also likely benefit greatly from using an i7 - the memory bandwidth is simply insane. Later, when I can test some low voltage higher speed DDR3's I expect to see significantly greater memory bandwidth - but even now, with DDR3-1066, you can get roughly three times the memory bandwidth that you could get from the previous champion, an X48 DDR3 setup. SSD's will also be big for servers, just watch.

I was not sure Intel could do it again - have another step-like increase in performance like it did with the Pentium D to Core 2 transition - but they pulled it off. The Core i7's are insanely fast for integer, floating point and MMX computation, and they have the memory bandwidth to keep those hungry cores fed.

Well done Intel.

Highly Recommended.