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i7920 or i7940?

Jonney Napalm

Jonney Napalm

Jonney Napalm

Associate
Joined
8 Jan 2009
Posts
22
Hi, I'm new to these parts so please go easy on me :)
Firstly, hello to all.

I'm looking to buy a new rig for gaming and have ended up a little confused between the 920 and 940 i7 cpu's.

What is the actual difference between them, apart from about £200 and 0.26Mhz clock speed?
Is the 940 just a factory overclocked 920 or is there more to it than that?

I don't upgrade very often, so the i7 will be with me for a few years and as such I want to make the right choice as I normally spend a bit more on the processer and mobo and then in the future I will upgrade the gfx card etc to get max time out of my system.

I suppose what I'm really asking is, if I buy a 920 and o/c it a little bit, will it perform the same as a 940, draw the same power and run at the same temps.
Is the 940 really worth that £200ish more?

I saw another post the mentioned the the 940 had a internal higher bandwidth?

I think thats just confused me more.

Anyway, thanks for any replies,

Jonney.
 
The main diffrence is the price, there is no reason to pay double the price. There will be minimal difference especially if your overclocking.
 
I'd go for the 920 it'll clock just about as high, you'll not notice much difference in performance. IMO the 940 and the 965 are a waste of money.
 
Agreed at stock you won't notice a real world diff of 200mhz and as said the clocking potential is pretty much identicle, for this reason I went for the 920 :)
 
Jonney Napalm said:
Hi, I'm new to these parts so please go easy on me :)
Firstly, hello to all
Click to expand...
Hello Jonney Napalm

Welcome to OcUK Forums! :)

Jonney Napalm said:
I'm looking to buy a new rig for gaming and have ended up a little confused between the 920 and 940 i7 cpu's
Click to expand...
Jonney, you have had a lot of replies so far and not one of them have questioned if Intel® Core™ i7 is a good purchase for you at this time :confused:

I am curious what your total budget is because for less money you could be putting together a really nice 3GHz Intel® Core™ 2 gaming system with a really great graphics card that will deliver lots of gaming goodness! :)

As is obvious, a lot of peeps jump blindly onto the Intel® Core™ i7 *bandwagon* without really considering the alternatives?

What system are you currenty running?
 
Hello Big Wayne, thanks for your welcome.

My budget is circa £2k for the rig, as I said I don't upgrade very often, so when I do I end up paying the premium for getting the more cutting edge gear that will make the system a little more 'future proof'.
Currently looking at an i7 920, HD4870X2 combo as I believe that should see me right for the near, if not mid-term future.
Although Core 2 duo's are very good, and I have many friends who love theirs, I'd like to go for the i7 core as I believe, rightly or wrongly, that the i7 is currently the fastest and most future proof of the lot.
Just a shame that anything i7 related carrys an extortionate price tag.
I really don't see prices dropping dramatically in the near future though due to the weakness of the pound and other financial constraints.

Currently I'm back to an old AMD XP2500+ and an ATI 9800XT gfx card as my macbook pro is having a wobbly and won't get repaired for a few weeks.
Still managing to play L4D and kick some zombie butts though.

Jonney :)
 
Jonney Napalm said:
Hello Big Wayne, thanks for your welcome.

My budget is circa £2k for the rig, as I said I don't upgrade very often, so when I do I end up paying the premium for getting the more cutting edge gear that will make the system a little more 'future proof'.
Currently looking at an i7 920, HD4870X2 combo as I believe that should see me right for the near, if not mid-term future.
Although Core 2 duo's are very good, and I have many friends who love theirs, I'd like to go for the i7 core as I believe, rightly or wrongly, that the i7 is currently the fastest and most future proof of the lot.
Just a shame that anything i7 related carrys an extortionate price tag.
I really don't see prices dropping dramatically in the near future though due to the weakness of the pound and other financial constraints.

Currently I'm back to an old AMD XP2500+ and an ATI 9800XT gfx card as my macbook pro is having a wobbly and won't get repaired for a few weeks.
Still managing to play L4D and kick some zombie butts though.

Jonney :)
Click to expand...

Spot on! I'm in the same boat, bring on i7!

RoEy
 
Jonney Napalm said:
My budget is circa £2k for the rig, as I said I don't upgrade very often, so when I do I end up paying the premium for getting the more cutting edge gear that will make the system a little more 'future proof'
Click to expand...
Hey Jonney,

hehe 2K on a rig! :eek: you sound like you have been out of the hardware scene for years and years and years! :D

There is no rational reason for spending even half of that money on a system now in 2009, I understand back in the day things were pretty expensive but everything has changed now, there is some amazing hardware for sale that is easy on the wallet and will blow you away 100%

Even if you throw in a brand new 24" HD monitor you could cap your budget at £1000 and walk away with a stunning gaming machine and £1000 still in your pocket/bank/piggy bank etc

Jonney Napalm said:
I'd like to go for the i7 core as I believe, rightly or wrongly, that the i7 is currently the fastest and most future proof of the lot
Click to expand...
I think you may have had the wool pulled well and true over your eyes, possibly your whole head! :p

Intel® Core™ i7 is not a primary gaming platform, it was designed to address the server and power user market and really does not a lot for gaming unless you lob £1000 of GPU at it and run games at beyond HD resolution.

I honestly believe you are greatly under-estimating the real world speed increase that Intel® Core™ 2 will bring you, clocked above 3GHz and paired with a nice single GPU will absolutely blow you away!

Future Proof is a concept derived by the marketing men and payrolled hardware sites, paying out a lot of extra money for features that will bring you no benefit today, tomorrow or the day after that . . . it's a false economy

Intel® Core™ i7 is kinda beta at the moment and will be re-worked and refined greatly over the next 6-12 months. As a gaming machine you will not be able to tell the difference. I bet you could build a £600 tower today and then build a second Intel® Core™ i7 machine in 6 months with the money saved, not that you need two towers but just an example of what a bad investment 2K would be if spent today!

Jonney Napalm said:
Currently I'm back to an old AMD XP2500+ and an ATI 9800XT gfx card
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Holy **** you have missed out on some amazing hardware the past 6 years . . . knowing what system you are running it makes perfect sense your almost insane lust for some new hardware but seriously get a grip and step back from the situation.

You have been reading a lot of Hardware site reviews and post made by Hardware nuts/addicts, your information stream is tainted beyond belief and your perspective skewed and far removed from the Real-World lol! :D

Feel free to proceed how you wish and please forgive me if this post come across a bit much, it's just my opinion which I give freely and with good intention! . . . in short I am saying save your money mate and still enjoy a wonderful modern gaming computer, sounds almost too good to be huh! :cool:
 
I can't help but agree with the above. If you want a new machine for gaming, then there's no reason to go beyond Core2, unless you're set on getting multiple graphics cards for SLI or Crossfire.

I personally would like something to be out, which would be worth upgrading over a Core2 machine (for gaming), as I certainly like the idea of there being some clear-cut better hardware out there which I can save up for! But with the games at the moment, the limit is reached with a Core2 at 3GHz, processor wise. I don't see this changing for a while as well; maybe when DirectX 11 gets released along with compatible games, will Core2's start to become outdated, but this is just pure speculation (and some wishful thinking!) on my behalf, and who knows what the best compatible hardware will be then.

I mean, if you're set on spending 2K on a new rig, then okay, I guess you've cornered yourself into getting i7. But if not, I'd say get a Core2 instead. As I said, you'll only notice gaming improvements with i7 if you get SLI or Crossfire with it, which isn't needed to handle any of the games out today. And as games progress, newer single graphics cards (e.g. GTX 300) will be released to handle them at max settings with a high resolution. Multiple graphics cards are just needed if you want a whopping fps (depending on the game), and not just perfectly fine realworld playability, which is what you can get from single graphics cards.

Edit:

About futureproofing: From reading what I said above, why not get a Core2 machine now, and keep the some money saved for a years time, when Direct X 11 will be out, as it's highly likely there'll be at least a Direct X 11 graphics card to upgrade to?
 
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Agreed you can get a gaming rig for a fraction of the price at about 80/90% of the speed and to be honest the first lot of new chipsets i.e. i7 will more likely change slightly like the first 775 few generation boards that will not support the later cpu's so sometime future proofing may not be that good.

Plus a c2d with a top of the range videocard will eat through most games
 
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as much as i agree with the people telling you to save your money and buy the kit in 6 months, i personally dont think you will be missing out on much, prices are not going to go dramatically down, the CPUs are clocking to 4Ghz now (the new revision MIGHT hit 4.5 but no one knows for sure).

as far as i can tell with I7 you would only be spending an additional £400 anyway, because the Mobo and triple channel DDR3 is so expensive at the moment.
Oh and there's no such thing as future proof, but if you still want a mobo and memory that will be compatable (as long as they dont change much in the next CPU revision) with everything intel bring ut in the next year and a half go with I7 at least then you would only have to change the CPU and GPU :)
 
Sayso said:
as far as i can tell with I7 you would only be spending an additional £400 anyway, because the Mobo and triple channel DDR3 is so expensive at the moment.
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I think the main reason Nahelem motherboards are expensive is because of them being able to do SLI on Intel - it's the license.

As for ram, can get 6GB of DDR 3 for around £180, considering your getting an additional 2GB ram i.e. 6GB versus 4GB on other platforms it's not so bad.

As for the original question, just go for the i7 920 if your mind is set on Nahelem platform.
 
"As for ram, can get 6GB of DDR 3 for around £180, considering your getting an additional 2GB ram i.e. 6GB versus 4GB on other platforms it's not so bad."

You can use 8Gb on P45 can't you?
 
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