Previews - Intel Nehalem benchmarked: muscling to victory

[HEXUS]

HEXUS gets its hands on an Intel Nehalem box running a Core i7 at 2.93GHz. Find out how it stacks up against present competition.

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[HSK]

hmm looks good i guess...by the time i need a new system, it will probably use one of these.

[staffsMike]

Looks like a step up certainly.. I'm in no rush to get it though.

[AdamAnubis]

Just when i go out and buy a P45 and a E8400, they release this -.- Always the way

Personally, i think this success depends on how quickly DDR3 prices drop, along with the X58 boards' pricing.

Until DDR3 comes down in price, i can't see these becoming mainstream very quickly.

[comanoodle]

WAV encoding...? What?
The tests on that page are very obscure.
WinRAR takes varying lengths of time to compress different files, so you left us with nothing to compare to.

You compared with DivX and LAME at the same time, which makes doing tests at home here also very difficult to do fairly.

WAV encoding:
Maybe you mean PCM, but then I don't think you used a multithreaded program to do that since it's so fast that the hard drive is usually the bottleneck (and thus I doubt a multithreaded encoder even exists).
This is probably why your results look weird... that is, unless you misnamed it.

To make a better comparison, you should encode Elephant's Dream with the latest x264 and the audio with the Nero AAC encoder... your benchies are very confusing.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

what about some folding at home benches too? i'l be getting this next year feb

[kalniel]

Nehalem is the reason I never got a Core 2 But to be honest I was expecting a little bit more than even these pretty good results. Much tweakage is obviously still to be done though with the headroom Intel already have I'd be surprised if they didn't hold back some of the optimisations for the tick product.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Nehalem is the reason I never got a Core 2 But to be honest I was expecting a little bit more than even these pretty good results. Much tweakage is obviously still to be done though with the headroom Intel already have I'd be surprised if they didn't hold back some of the optimisations for the tick product.

me 2. i brought a ps3 to last me a good few months as i didn't wanna go for a core 2. im still busting an old school P4 3.2ghz pc mate. how bad is that! i must fo skipped like 3 whole generations of cpu's now LOL. imagine, from single core to quad core LOL!

[shaithis]

Waiting to see a few more benchmarks and tests but from this peek I might just get a Q9550 instead of replacing everything for nehalem.

[kingpotnoodle]

Intel have really been on a roll since they dropped the nasty Netburst architecture...

This finally brings all the advantages (i.e. IMC) that AMD used to enjoy and really shows just how good the core of Core is.

Nehalem has got to be a good 30-35% faster (estimating from the benchmarks) on a clock for clock basis than Phenom... AMD are in real trouble, Intel are launching the i7 at 3.2GHz, AMD would probably have to get to over 4GHz to compete with that, they have no chance.

Here's hoping AMD can get Shanghai going with tri-channel DDR3, and a good clock speed boost out of the 45nm process, otherwise the competition in the high end just won't exist and prices will stay high

I guess it will push Core 2 prices down though, so we'll still be able to get the "good if not excellent" performance for low money.

[Lee H]

Finally, a reason to wave bye-bye to my 939 dual-cored rig and embrace new technology which is going to give a nice performance increase

[Sumanji]

Uhoh for AMD...

Seriously considering i7 for my next rig.

[mercyground]

p4 rig? I'm still on a skt A rig!

Nehalem is nice... but the small l2 cache wont help in games. that huge l3 is more server side. Looks like intel is taking aim at AMD's Server percentage.

tri mem channels... thats going to be expensive. 3 or 6gb of DDR3? Wallet HURTING pain.

As for my next rig? I'm still going AMD. I still dont like where intel is going with their roadmaps. QPI has been badly needed for them as the FSB gets badly choked with all the cores sharing it.

I'm after a nice BE quad with a Lovely motherboard with a 750SB on it
Feed it 4gb of ram and a 4850 or 4870. (I only game in 1280x1024 so no real point going higher)

[Xtanto]

i7 will include huge improvments for servers however do not expect lots more gaming performance.

[Tidus]

A bit better than what I expected, AMD looks to be in trouble, if only they can pull of another suprise like they did on the GPU front. I've been expecting a lot from Shanghai but I've heard nothing about it compared to all the Nehalem hype.

DDR3 is the real killer for this CPU though, I'm looking at getting 8GB's+ of ram for my next system but I could never afford that in DDR3.

I'm still running an AMD Athlon 2500+ as I didn't like the poor competition from Phenom CPU's, hopefully Shanghai is gonna be a real suprise like the 4850 / 4870.

[shaithis]

Leave it 6 months from launch and DDR3 will be dirt cheap. The same always happens when there is a major shift in the mainstream memory type.