The Intel Core i7 860 Review

by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST

PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Data Recovery - par2cmdline 0.4 Multithreaded

Our Par2 test actually puts both the 860 and 870 slightly ahead of the Core i7 975. It's clear that anything faster than a Core i5 750 in this case basically performs about the same. It looks like we're starting to be bottlenecked by our SSD.

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.

Microsoft Excel 2007 SP1 - Monte Carlo Simulation

Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation

Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.

Sony Vegas Pro 8 - Blu-ray Disc Image Creation (25Mbps MPEG-2)

Again the Core i7 860 pulls slightly ahead of the 920 and falls short of the 870, right where we'd expect it to land.

Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation

Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.

Sorenson Squeeze Pro 5 - Flash Video Creation

The 860 and the 920 keep trading positions, but as you'd expect given the similar price points - the two perform about the same.

WinRAR - Archive Creation

Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:

WinRAR 3.8 Compression - 300MB Archive

3D Rendering Performance Gaming Performance
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  • strikeback03 - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link

    In previous tests Anand has used the fastest validated speed for each platform, so 1066 for Bloomfield and 1333 for Lynnfield. Not that it probably makes much difference in anything but synthetic benchmarks.
  • Scheme - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Woah, did you forget to take your ritalin last night?
  • mesiah - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Anand, can't you ban this guy? You have to be tired of watching him come on here and verbally assault any person he doesn't agree with, including yourself. Do everyone a favor and toss him to the curb.
  • jonup - Sunday, September 20, 2009 - link

    Noooo! This would be too cruel. We need a joker to make us laugh from time to time.
  • tim851 - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Let me guess, you have an i7 920...?

    Of course the 860 ran at higher clock speeds, why would Anand underclock it? It was compared to the 920 because they share the same price point. That is until you add the motherboard, then the i7 is like 100$ more expensive.

    And Anand summed it up nicely: the 1366 platform is now for people who need hexa-cores someday or who think SLI/Crossfire is reasonable.

    Oh, and if the P55 Platform is "braindamaged", then apparently all major tech sites are in on the conspiracy.
  • jordanclock - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    What do you mean by "inferior memory?"

    And of course the 860 was running at a higher clock rate: That's how it is designed to run. Even without Turbo.
  • TA152H - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    I don't have a problem with the 860 running at higher clock speeds, but if the architecture were better, it would never lose to a processor running at lower clock speeds.

    In short, the architecture is not clearly better. It's worse, the margin is the only thing worth discussing.
  • TA152H - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    I should have said, i7 920 still outperformed it in a few benchmarks.

    Pity there isn't an edit.
  • JumpingJack - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    The basic architecture of Lynnfield is the same as Bloomfield. The differences are the topology of the platform (PCI on die instead of in the chipset, 2 mem controllers instead of 3, no QPI in Lynnfield). The cores are exactly the same, the cache is exactly the same.
  • jordanclock - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    I have yet to see any real world scenarios where triple channel memory "really shines." The inclusion or exclusion of a triple channel set up would account for variations of about 1% either way. In other words, less than the margin of error.

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