Conclusion

With the recent Bloomfield product line Intel presents the most powerful desktop CPU available these times. Especially the Core i7 975 XE delivers more performance than any other CPU on the market and this by a quite big margin. But as expected, so much performance also comes at high costs. Therefore Intel nowadays wants CHF 1179.- for a i7 975 XE. On the other hand you get an exclusive CPU which wont be thrown from the performance-thron very soon.

Generally you can see the immense performance the recent Intel Core i7 CPUs deliver. If we look at the theoretical benchmarks from SiSoft Sandra we see what is possible with the new models. Especially the memory bandwidth the triple-channel interface is able to achieve is astonishing. Furthermore we can also see a nearly perfect scaling to the clock frequencies. Therefore a Core i7 975 XE CPU is about 30 percent quicker than a Core i7 920 with 2.66 GHz clock speed.

Suspicious regarding the gaming performance is the fact that in recent games with high resolutions the titles do nearly not profit from higher clock speeds. The reason therefore is that games with high resolutions and maximum antialiasing as well as anisotropic filtering settings aren't CPU limited, they are limited by the graphics card. As a consequence the bottleneck, regarding overall performance when game benchmarks are executed, isn't the CPU, it is the graphics card in this case. For example at Crysis the difference between a Core i7 920 and a Core i7 XE is 0.79 percent. In other games the results aren't any different. The performance therefore never varies more than one percent.

If you're looking for weaknesses in the recent Core i7 product line you might find one when looking at the power consumption. Under load our testsystem, even when equipped with a Core i7 920, draws more than 200 Watt out of the power plug. With a Core i7 975 XE it gets even worse until 220 Watts are being drawn constantly. Idle, when there is nearly no load on the CPU, our test setup still draws between 130 and 140 Watt. Hence the conclusion is that a Core i7 CPU is just expensive when initially buying it is also comparatively expensive while using.

If you're looking for the most powerful CPUs on the market the Core i7 models will definitely be your choice. Building an enthusiasts system, a video editing- or digital audio workstation will be perfect when assembling a system based on a Core i7 975 XE. If you'd like to configure a gaming system which even at high resolutions still has reserves a Core i7 920 will be sufficient because as we saw in the gaming benchmarks the framerates do not scale with the clock speed at high resolutions with high detail settings.

At Digitec you can buy the Core i7 975 XE, the Core i7 950 and i7 920 to the following prices:

• Core i7 975 XE: CHF 1179.- (ca. EUR 786.-)
• Core i7 950: CHF 666.- (ca. EUR 444.-)
• Core i7 920: CHF 339.- (ca. EUR 226.-)