Herald likes the i7
Pat Pilcher at the Herald seems to like the i7 also:
The elves at Intel must’ve been extra busy, as they’ve managed to crank out a whole brand-spanking new line of totally re-designed CPUs.
Because CPUs are essentially the engine powering your PC, any new releases are potentially huge news, and I’m pleased to report that Intel’s latest bit of silicon goodness, code-named Nehalem (but officially called Intel Core i7), is very massive news indeed, sporting serious speed to burn – and then some.
I’m almost cursing myself for geeking out in Melbourne on some great compututer games running on the i7 chips. Because since then I have almost obsessively wanted to go out and a buy a whopping big kick ass PC loaded full of games.
The problem is I am a compulsive person. If I start a new game, I won’t stop playing it until I have completed all levels – and if that means 20 hours non-stop, so be it.
This is why I have only one game on my laptop – a simple battle strategy game that takes only around 30 to 60 minutes to win at. It has 10,000 different world setups so it never is the same challenge.
Anyway back to the i7:
The review Nehalem processor I was sent clocked in at a fairly zippy 3.2GHz. If it were a car, the Nehalem would have so much raw horsepower that Jeremy Clarkson would probably experience a spontaneous trouser accident. Some fearless geeks have already managed to overclock it to a positively searing 4.05GHz – this would leave Clarkson very red-faced, not to mention brown-jockeyed.
Benchmarking-wise, the single Nehalem powered motherboard came pretty close to wiping the floor with the SkullTrail motherboard which was powered by two 3.2GHz Core 2 Quad QX9770 CPUs.
Putting the Core i7 through its paces with Sisoft Sandra’s benchmarking application saw it score an astonishing 102530, which is only marginally slower than the 116498 scored by the Skulltrail.
Considering that that the Nehelem’s score was achieved with only half the processor cores of the Skulltrail, this is very impressive indeed.
My current laptop is two years old. I normally wait three years to buy a new one, but the HP has turned out to be disappointing, so may upgrade it a year early. I travel so much with it, I go for small and portable.
I don’t currently have a desktop at home. I have several at work (which is very close by) and don’t really need one for home. But a dedicated gaming one is tempting. On the other hand maybe a playstation for the flat screen TV?