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Only a few
months back and the dawning of time
changed the way gaming and workstations
functioned. Intel's i7 CPU and the X58
chipset most certainly had us in awe.
Muhammad Ali once said "Champions
aren't made in gyms.
Champions are made from something they
have deep inside them. They have a
desire, a dream, a vision. They
have to have the skill and the will.
But the will must be stronger than the
skill".
This brought forward our articles on
"The Need for Speed". Whether a Single
socket Nehalem CPU or Dual socket
Nehalem CPU's many have seen life
changing opportunities to their gaming
rigs, or as we fully focus upon the
workstation environment. The changes
have been huge and productivity has
taken the biggest leaps forward in many
years. Not withstanding the costs of
SSD's has dropped dramatically and
improved substantially meaning some of
the most fastest systems around are
being build.
Once more we now see a significant
change in areas with Intel's new
offerings from the Nehalem family and
enter the Lynnfield variant. This
variant though once more brings with it
some very clever technological major
changes to the CPU and mainboard and
these will be covered briefly as we
delve into the workings of both.
The first
Lynnfield chips to be unveiled today are
the models Core i7-870 (4 cores, 8
threads, 8MB cache, 2.93GHz
clock-speed), Core i7-860 (4 cores, 8
threads, 8MB cache, 2.80GHz clock-speed)
and Core i5-750 (4 cores, 4 threads, 8MB
cache, 2.66GHz clock-speed) that will
cost approximately $562, $284 and $196
(prices should be checked with your
reseller for more accurate price
points), respectively and as more
accurately detailed below. |
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Enter PCH
(Primary Controller Hub) and cheerio to
good old faithful North Bridge. What
are we going to hold onto now whilst
positioning the mainboard into the
chassis.
Joking apart
this range of CPU's from Intel bring to
the fore a serious choice for end-users,
cost is not an issue for those whose
budgets just cannot reach the top end I7
CPU's. Performance is as you will see
within is very surprising to say the
least. So for a budget range CPU, in
our opinion the end-user is actually
walking away with a very high performing
CPU.
There is now
readily many companies sporting higher
frequency memory modules for the new P55
mainboards. Intel stipulates 1333HMz
and there are always many good reasons
why this is so. Many overclockers will
try and push the boards to their
absolute limits; however here today we
are focusing on how easily adaptable
this range of CPU's and mainboards Intel
have launched can and will be found in
the workstation environment. This is
most certainly is a huge target market
from our point of view as the 3
mainboards released all have
capabilities in supporting a reasonably
good professional graphics card -
actually you can readily put in the top
end cards as long as you have the
correct supporting PSU and still come
away with a few pennies left in the R &
D account. |
