Intel's Core i7 870 & i5 750, Lynnfield: Harder, Better, Faster Stronger
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Best Gaming CPU?
When I first previewed Lynnfield I theorized that its aggressive turbo modes would make it the best gaming CPU on the market. Most games these days use between two and four threads, not enough for Hyper Threading to be truly beneficial. As a result, Nehalem never really did all that well in games. It was generally faster than the competition, but not much and not on a performance-per-dollar basis.
I ran a few new game tests under Windows 7 to accompany our usual game benchmarks. The competitors here are limited to Lynnfield (of course), Bloomfield, Penryn and AMD's Phenom II.
Dawn of War II doesn't actually shatter any expectations. While turbo clearly benefits Lynnfield, it isn't enough to dethrone Bloomfield. The Core i7 920 is marginally faster than the new i5 750. Here's where things get interesting though: look at minimum frame rates. In both Lynnfield platforms, the minimum frame rates are higher than the competing Bloomfield system. That appears to be Lynnfield's aggressive turbo modes at work. While they're not constantly pushing Lynnfield to a higher clock speed, they do apparently help out when it matters the most.
The other thing to notice is the lowest Lynnfield is a faster gaming CPU than Intel's fastest dual-core: the E8600.
Sacred 2 is an example of performance standings in a more normal manner. Lynnfield can't seem to outperform Bloomfield, and the Core i5 750 actually falls slightly behind AMD's Phenom II X4 965 BE.
With World of Warcraft we're back to turbo mode having a very positive impact. The Core i7 870 is nearly as fast as the i7 975, while the i5 750 is a bit slower than the i7 920. Both are faster than the Phenom II X4 965 BE, which is in turn faster than the Q9650.
These three benchmarks seem to outline the three most realistic options for Lynnfield's gaming performance. In situations where its turbo modes can work, Lynnfield can be equal to if not faster than Bloomfield. In those situations where it doesn't kick in, Lynnfield is at least competitive with Phenom II and Bloomfield. In all situations the old Core 2 Quad Q9650 is at the bottom of the charts.
I'll throw in one more option just to complicate things. Have a look at this:
Not exactly the norm, but here we have the Phenom II X4 965 BE faster than everything - including the Core i7 975. Unfortunately there's no one benchmark that will sum up how these things perform, but overall it looks like Lynnfield is going to be one capable gaming CPU.
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yacoub - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
lol, what a stupid comment. yes it's "cheating" to benchmark the processor the way it comes out of the box, which also happens to be how it is used in the real world environment.Voo - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
Well there are many users who don't bother with overclocking so the tests aren't "illegal" or anything.But I tend to agree that most users who would be interested in buying an i7 920 or i7 860 would overclock it, so turbo mode wouldn't help at all, as we see with the OC results.
I'm curious if PCI-e on die is the only problem and if we'll see new chips who benefit from turbo mode even when overclocked. After all the principle behind turbo mode doesn't change if you overclock, does it?
james jwb - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
IF that's true, i'm not at all happy with this review. But i'll wait for someone else to confirm this for obvious reasons... anand, confirm!Voo - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
You read the text, didn't you? It was mentioned several times..james jwb - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
i don't have time to read through all of it right now, was just flicking through and immeditaly thought to ask the question. I will read it fully later on, though.Hence why i asked the question. You say "it", as in which way, benches had turbo, benches didn't?
snakeoil - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
yes again, turbo was on for all the benchmarks which is illegal and biased.maxxcool - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
yes, the federal government says making a feature that makes your product better is legal.JarredWalton - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
Illegal and biased? Yes, Intel is illegally making their CPUs run better at all workloads for normal users that don't overclock. Someone should arrest them! What would be biased is to test these CPUs in a fashion that artificially limits performance. Sure, it would be nice to see performance compared with and without Turbo enabled, but generally there's not enough time to run every potentially interesting test scenario.snakeoil - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
there you go, finally you said it.all the benchmarks have at least 600 mhz over the processor's stock speed.
that is outrageous, then if you want to compare the result with phenom 2 you have to overclock phenom 2 at least 600 mhz over stock speed.
just to be fair
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - link
The processor's stock speed is variable according to the workload it's running, that's what turbo mode does. AMD will enable similar functionality in 2011. This is the out-of-box performance of Lynnfield. Turbo mode is a feature of the processor as it has been since the mobile Penryn days (and more recently Nehalem). There's no reason to disable it as no end user would, unless you want to make Intel look worse for some reason.We also ran Turbo on vs. off numbers in the review: http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=36...">http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=36...
Take care,
Anand