How much quicker in games are I7s vs older Qs ?

[Rroff]

I never understood why people are always hailing the phenom 2. The chips are cheap but good mobos are quite expensive...and people say they are awesome, amazing overclockers yet I don't think I've seen more than 3.9ish ghz for a stable 24/7 clock. Pretty poosauce if you ask me.

high-res performance does seem quite good though.

its the new latest best thing - a lot of people get sucked into the hype - add in a lot of reviews which only bother to benchmark the CPUs at stock or even going as far as to try and justify crippling the i7 platform for "fairer" benchmark results... and there you have it...

The Phenom II is a great value for money chip - as far as the chip itself goes - but it just doesn't stack up well against the i7 in any high end enthusiast rig IMO. For the average consumer tho I guess its a great product... for the average enthusiast no.

 

[Talrinys]

Games are software applications like any other program, you don't get a CPU that destroys the competition on all fronts but suddenly chokes in games, games are simply the only application to have a massive hardware co-dependency which is a GPU.

It might, AFAIK gaming is based on integer performance on the CPU, while the GPU handles floating points, if a CPU is optimized for integer performance over FP that should make a difference, as i read it that is the reason for the huge efficiency improvement in C2D, while Nehalem focuses primarily on FP performance.

 

[elpedro]

I'm sitting tight until something can obliterate my Q6600 @ 3.6 with equal value for money.

 

[mmj_uk]

It might, AFAIK gaming is based on integer performance on the CPU, while the GPU handles floating points, if a CPU is optimized for integer performance over FP that should make a difference, as i read it that is the reason for the huge efficiency improvement in C2D, while Nehalem focuses primarily on FP performance.

You're right but from what I've seen i7 has superior Int/FP performance as well as more memory bandwidth, it's basically an improvement in all areas.

The biggest advantage I can see with the C2D/C2Q architecture is that they're not true multicore (the cores are paired and share L3 cache), so in single/dual threaded games where not all cores are being used you can have a situation where two cores each have 6MB L3 to play with.