At the beginning of November last year we quietly came out of the stable with Intel's new i7 Microarchitecture, it did indeed cause a magnificent storm as many are still reeling from the utter raw performance it had to show.  In conjunction with the new QPI memory controller many readers could not believe just how rapid a transformation had been made to the IT industry overnight.

Eight months down the line we now see the dawning of time and a new revolution of a speed step faster with the new i7 975 processor bringing a new fabled speed of 3.33GHz.  Many still are out there successfully overclocking these earlier edition CPU's to great success.  However, within the professional benchmarking community we are tied to stock speeds.  With this in mind, just how much performance is to be gained from this magnificent new CPU from Intel.  The next few pages will reveal all.

There has been a good few articles now posted up online already covering the beneficial gains to be got from this new CPU within the gaming community.  It is now the turn for the professional community.  Can this be the answer to all our questions as and running at  3.33 GHz, 133 MHz faster than its 965 Extreme predecessor and maintaining 6.4GT/s QPI.  The i7-975 Extreme sports the same 130W TDP as the 965 with an additional set of 7 new SSE4 instructions.

The baseline factors covered we decided to present todays article like for like when we did the initial launch back in November, this way you as the reader will be able to draw your own conclusion at to how much performance uptake is to be gained from this new CPU.  Therefore todays system configuration is as follows;

The mainboard bios settings were left at default and it automatically adjusted the clock speed settings and voltages to facilitate the CPU’s and Memory to maintain the higher functionality which the mainboard has to offer.

Hardware Suppliers for the Review

Intel EU for the supply of the Mainboard & CPU shown, Western Digital for the SATA Hard Drive, AMD for the supply of the FireGL V8700 professional graphics card, Akasa for a majority peripherals required for this review and finally but by no means least; Crucial Memory for their supply of the exclusive high speed i7 Nehalem verified memory.

With the support and help of all the companies involved.   It gives you the reader a new choice on upgrade paths that many of you look for here with the performance ratio’s each system has to provide. 

Systems Integrators, OEM’s and VAR’s should contact all companies directly for pricing and availability of all components. Members of the public should contact their respective suppliers requesting the parts directly.

Benchmarks and Software Used (32 Bit Mode)

Many benchmarks have been heavily covered already therefore we felt it inappropriate to repeat this process with the few exceptions.   The clock ticked hard and fast against us therefore we did only have a very short time in which to complete this basic but factual review.

Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2c with Service Pack 3
Sandra 2009 with SP 3
Bentley MicroStation V8 XM Graphics Benchmark v1.0.0.5
Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 Scenes
MAXON CINEBENCH 10
SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™
SPECviewperf 10 ®

Each set of tests has been applied on the clean system hard drives shown above to ensure that no residue drivers were left installed with all updates/patches applied.   A test/render has been completed many times over different periods of the system uptime.   Maintaining the fair play rules of SPECviewperf® and SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ we did not manipulate any of this mainboards functionality and left it at its default settings in which it was supplied.   Tests have been conducted at 1280 X 1024 @ 60Hz in 32 bit colour.   Results that have been shown within this review are from the application/benchmarks first run in accordance with the SPECviewperf® fair play rules.  Not an average of 3 runs as some places seem to think is right. 

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Miscellaneous Tests
Page 3 - Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 Scenes
Page 4 - Professional Benchmarks
Page 5 - Conclusions