A new day, a new dawn and a new era in the life of Intel bringing to the fore a whole new concept of computing. When a product of this nature and magnitude comes along it most certainly has us standing up and paying great attention to what it can bring to the end users within the professional community. There have been many rumours of what the i7 can do and cannot do. What it cannot do, we have not been able to find it as every which way we turned it showed us differently.

With a first outing of this magnitude it means that something special should grace the new set-up. Notwithstanding, this is a double first outing as we see today the exclusive first look at ATI's FirePro V8700 professional graphics card. Therefore this is an article which is going to have many of you out there reeling at the power of both the i7 with its supporting X58 chipset mainboard and the ferocious influence the ATI FirePro V8700 has to offer.

This enthusiast motherboard houses the X58 chipset, supporting three DDR3 channels, LGA1366 socket and ICH10 Southbridge which has been code-named Smackover. Its packaged in an ATX form factor desktop board based on the Intel X58 Express chipset, 6 SATA (3.0Gb/s) ports storage capability, 1 PCI, 3 PCI Express* x16, 1 PCI Express x1 IEEE-1394a, Gigabit LAN, 2 eSATA ports, Intel High Definition Audio supporting 8-channel Dolby* surround sound.

If you pop in a fourth module and occupy all the slots the DX58SO motherboard won't be running in quad-channel. It does default back down to single channel mode, which in turn has an impact memory bandwidth. Therefore run with triple channel set-up when possible. The official support memory clock speed is 1066MHz, but times have changed and 1333MHz, 1600MHz and even 2000MHz memory kits will work on the platform. But make sure you have the correct supporting CPU. There are plenty of supplying these new timing triple kits. Some are at a great premium.

Plenty of features to behold. Delve into the bios and its an overclockers heaven. There are so many variables one could spend all day covering this, though with the help of other websites who have pushed forward the board to day you can read all about that later in your own time. For now and today, we have to run at the stock values as these are the basic requirements of some of the tests completed within.

Firstly as its Intel's day we look at a few of the primary features that Nehalem has to offer (kind thanks to Intel's Public Relations here).

Intel's next-generation microarchitecture (codenamed "Nehalem") represents the next step in processor energy efficiency, performance, and dynamic scalability. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of hafnium-based Intel® 45nm hi-k metal gate silicon technology, Nehalem will also be the first to introduce Intel® QuickPath technology.

Now performance really does come "on-demand"

• Dynamic scalability, managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces, and power for energy-efficient performance on 
  demand.
• Design and performance scalability for server, workstation, PC, and mobile demands with support for 2-8+ cores
  and up to 16+ threads with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), and scalable cache sizes, system interconnects,
  and integrated memory controllers.
• Simultaneous multi-threading brings high-performance applications into mainstream computing with 1-16+ threads
  optimized for a new generation multi-core processor architecture.
• Scalable shared memory of Intel QuickPath technology features memory distributed to each processor with
  integrated memory controllers and high-speed point-to-point interconnects to unleash the performance of next-
  generation Intel® multi-core processors.
• Multi-level shared cache improves performance and efficiency by reducing latency to frequently used data.

Intel® QuickPath Technology

Unleashing performance with interconnect system architecture

Providing point-to-point high-speed links to distributed shared memory, Intel® QuickPath technology unleashes the parallel processing performance of next-generation Intel® 45nm microarchitectures (codenamed Nehalem and Tukwila). These microarchitectures, built from the ground up, will be the first to use the Intel QuickPath interconnect system and can see significant improvements in overall performance.

With new Intel QuickPath technology built into future Nehalem and Tukwila microarchitectures, each processor core will feature an integrated memory controller and high-speed interconnect, linking processors and other components to deliver:

• Dynamically scalable interconnect bandwidth designed to set loose the full performance of Nehalem, Tukwila, and
  future generations of Intel® multi-core processors
• Outstanding memory performance and flexibility to support leading memory technologies
• Tightly integrated interconnect reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) with design-scalable configurations
  for optimal balance of price, performance, and energy efficiency

The new chips can switch off processing cores not in use.   A faster Green CPU....

The new Intel® i7 CPU's come in 3 flavours as we have listed below.

Therefore what does this translate into real terms that many will be trying to fathom out.

• The Front Side Bus is replaced by a QuickPath interface. This means that motherboards must use a chipset that
  supports QuickPath.
• The memory controller is on the processor, not in a separate chip, so the memory is directly connected to the
  processor.
• The memory controller supports three channels of memory, and each channel can support one or two DDR3
  Dimms. This means that motherboards for the Core i7 have three or six DIMM slots instead of two or four, and that
  Dimms should be installed in sets of three, not two.
• Intel® Core i7 is a single-die device: all four cores, the memory controller, and all cache are on a single die.
• Intel® Core i7 cores re-implement Hyper-threading. Each of the four cores can process two threads
  simultaneously, so the processor appears to the Operating System as eight CPUs.

With this brief explanation of the i7 now completed we now move onwards to the new ATI FirePro V8700 over onto page 2

Page 1 - i7 Introduction and X58 Smackover Mainboard
Page 2 - ATI FirePro V8700
Page 3 - Pictures
Page 4 - System Set-up and Software Used
Page 5 - HD Tach Version 3.0.4.0 and HD Tune Ver 3.0
Page 6 - Sandra 2009
Page 7 - Everest Disc Benchmark and ATTO Hard Drive Benchmark
Page 8 - PCMark 2005 Advanced
Page 9 - MAXON CINEBENCH 10 and Autodesk 3ds Max 9 SP2 Scenes
Page 10 - Bentley MicroStation V8 XM Graphics Benchmark v1.0.0.5
Page 11 - SPECapc for SolidWorks 2007™ and SPECviewperf 10 ®
Page 12 - Conclusions and Awards