Core i7 CPU

Testing Rig and Benchmarks
When testing a system like this, you really need the latest and greatest of everything. Thankfully, Intel knew this, and supplied us with the following, to which we added a power supply and graphics card:

i965 3.2GHz Nehalem CPU (8MB, 133MHz QPI link, 45nm process)
Quimonda 3x1GB DDR3 sticks (1067MHz, CL7)
Intel X25-M 80GB SSD
Intel DX58SO Extreme motherboard
Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme cooler with LGA1366 mounting bracket

Apart from being the kind of tech that you’d do unscrupulous things just to get a look at, we finally had a beefy test rig ready to rip through our benchmark suite like no other CPU has before – even heavily overclocked ones. All these tests, unless mentioned, were run at stock settings with Turbo Mode turned off.

Our first benchmark was Cinebench R10, which can be run in either singlethreaded or multithreaded mode. In a single thread, we got a score of 4,252, or about a hundred more than an E8600 at stock. When we ran the benchmark in multithreaded mode, we got a score of 18,321! Thanks to multithreading, we actually recorded an increase in efficiency of 4.31x over a single core – Hyperthreading was actually doing something useful!

The next benchmark was Hexus PiFast, a singlethreaded application that finished in 27.56 seconds. This is about half a second faster than an E8600, showing us that these kinds of applications won’t benefit much from Nehalem. Moving on to our third benchmark, wPrime, we recorded a single-threaded performance of 37.297 seconds, a 16 per cent performance boost over an E8600 – due to the huge amount of cache available to this CPU, the test is chewed through very quickly. When we enabled multithreading however, we had the entire test done in only 7.766 seconds, a speed boost of 4.8x over a single core! Hyperthreading is really working its magic here, with the same calculations repeated over and over able to be split into concurrent threads, keeping the CPU bursting to the seams with data.

Our final benchmark is Everest, a system information tool that also includes built-in memory benchmarks. We noted a huge memory read bandwidth of 14247MB/s, definitely a sign that the triple-channel memory and integrated memory controller are working wonders – this is much higher than the current dual-channel DDR2. Write speeds were also huge, the fast DDR3 able to write at 15438MB/s, with a latency of only 38.8ns! This means that the wait for data is quite literally halved, meaning that Nehalem can keep up with even the most demanding of programs.