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I7-965 My Early Thoughts

WesleyBurns said:
C2D E8400 @ 3.6 ghz - 1M Super Pi = 15 seconds
CI7 920 @ 3.6 - 1M Super Pi = 12 seconds

25% increase clock for clock

4Ghz out of £250 chip.

my origional c2d was a E6700, then a E8400, next year better 1366 chips will be out for less.
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MMM but the E8400 isnt a quad or does super pi not use all 4 cores?
I know my Q9550 at 3.6 was doing roughly 13secs and at 3.8 12.3 secs
 
AWPC said:
965 has unlocked QPI & overclocking features (dynamic on the fly turbo mode)
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The 920/940 has bin speed turbo modes. Retail 920/940 have unlocked QPI, lowest is 18xBLCK. Most get to 4Ghz giving the fabled 222 BCLK limit. With even the 920, that's 4.4GHz core before its an issue. Not that a faster QPI IOH is much use, like the AMD HyperTransport you won't see much improvement from overclocking it.
AWPC said:
& overvoltage protection removed which the other 2 do not have so even if they overclock well does not mean the system will be stable for long as it will cut back volts & QPI to save damage
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This can be disabled on 920/940 with a bios setting.
AWPC said:
BCLK can be changed only on 965. For the other 2 you need to lower ratio and up the Ram speeds but both are limited in how far they can go before the system will throttle.
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Careful a few of the reviews refer to locked ES chips. The baseclock can be increased on the retail 920/940. The real difference is the upper limits to the core multipliers. QPI, uncore and memory get a few multi to choose from, so you overclock the 920/940 just like the locked 775's FSB. Keep the Uncore/Mem/QPI multi as low as you can and up the BCLK till it tops out the core speed for a given voltage. The Uncore multi has to be twice the memory multi (or more), again 4GHz uncore is common, so 2GHz memory. A faster uncore will improve Pi times.

Take a retail 920, 180-200 BCLK should be easy enough, so the minimum values for the rest.

The multi on a Gigabyte UD5.
Core = x12 - x20 (x21 Turbo, x22 Turbo 1 core)
Uncore = x12 - x48
Mem = x6 - x18
QPI = x36 - x48 (they double it for some reason)

200 x 20 = 4000MHz CPU (4200GHz single core turbo)
200 x 12 = 2400Mhz Uncore (see NB frequency cpu-z cache page)
200 x 6 = 1200Mhz Mem (divide/2 and seen as 2:6 cpu-z mem page)
200 x 18 = 3600MHz QPI (see as QPI link cpu-z cpu page)

Put some values in this for suggested values > http://overclocking.gogar.com/corei7.cgi

Also


Retail 920+UD5
 
Last edited:
dirtydog said:
I would be interested for someone with an i7 chip to run the built-in WinRAR benchmark (from the Tools menu). From 3.6 onwards it is optimised for multi-core systems.

On a Q6600 @ 3.1 I got 1,959.

(if someone could run the bench with an i7 at the same clock speed as me, it would be interesting to see the clock for clock performance difference)
Click to expand...

I get 3,062 @ 4Ghz so i guess that would be 2,373 (3,062/4*3.1 - assuming its linear) so thats 20% faster clock for clock. I guess the gains are in the high OCing of the i7.
 
Well it overclocked better than any other CPU i ever had, and it was easy, guess the 45 nm process is helping out there. Only thing i did was bump my cpu voltage to 1.4v (didnt bother to lower it slowly yet, and set my RAM voltage to 1.640v spec).

It also helps getting your hands on some 1600 DDR3 instead of 1333 DDR3, helps with the oc a bit i guess, although u can choose a x6 memory multiplier which should be ok.
 
I'm about to get a brand new QX9770 for £500, I've just bought a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P with 8 GIG of OCZ PC2-8500C5 1066MHz and Vista 64. All i do is game so the i7 won't boost it that much for me ?
 
=VTA=MANFACE said:
I'm about to get a brand new QX9770 for £500, I've just bought a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P with 8 GIG of OCZ PC2-8500C5 1066MHz and Vista 64. All i do is game so the i7 won't boost it that much for me ?
Click to expand...

No not right now, it won't help you much with games, GPU's are the limiting factor.

The only + side to the i7 now is movie to the 1366 platform and the new chips that will come and SLI support, well for me anyway. So if you plan to step up next year, then this should be your deciding factor.

For about £650 (mobo 240, 3X1GB 1600 DDR3 ram 140, cpu 260) now u can go i7 and sell up your current rig and get some money back.
 
=VTA=MANFACE said:
I'm about to get a brand new QX9770 for £500
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That seems unusually cheap for that chip, going by prices I've seen.

Even so, unless you have very deep pockets I'd question the value of getting that when you could get say a Q9450/9550/9650 a lot cheaper and just overclock them to the 1600fsb of the QX9770. I presume you intend to overclock the QX9770 a lot as that's the only argument in favour of getting it over the other ones.
 
=VTA=MANFACE said:
I'm about to get a brand new QX9770 for £500, I've just bought a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P with 8 GIG of OCZ PC2-8500C5 1066MHz and Vista 64. All i do is game so the i7 won't boost it that much for me ?
Click to expand...

Woah.....what a waste of cash. You couldd get a 920 and a mobo for that.
 
gt_junkie said:
Does seem like an oportunity lost though TBH. :(

If i was spending that kind of money i would not buy older tech when the i7's perform like this and clock pretty well.

gt
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I'll more than likely upgrade in June. I would hardly call a QX9770 old tech :rolleyes: especially for the money I'm paying for it. ;)
 
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