What is happening to the i7 range?

[AMG]

well I used to have a Q6600, first few months it was fine, till I changed PSU, which shorted out (made a hell of a buzz to) replace it, than I couldn't get it over 3.0Ghz changed mem and mobo still refused to clock so I got a Q9550 in the end

 

[Combat Fighter]

Rumors are that Intel does plan to withdraw the i7 920 and 940 chips when the Lynnfield is launched because there are comparatively close.

Well i7 920's are still going strong. . .

 

[capriboy1978]

and holding / decreasing in price. If the rumour mill has any weight you'll see the 920 creep up in price and probably some decrease in availability.

No hard evidence but I doubt we won't see a 925 or similar with 4 cores with slightly higher base clocks or maybe bigger cache / 22x multi for a small price bump, maybe £250ish.

If not and the 920 dissapears I wouldn't worry too much if you go that route - by the yime your 920 set up is past it's best, knowing intel, there'll be a whole new set up of skts and processors. For me the price hike for 920 i7 over i5 / i7 860 was neither here nor there. If your building to a strict budget then thats a different matter.

 

[zsolmanz]

Well - the first question is whether 6600--> 9550 is worth it, and if not you ought to look at i5. There's some really good deals in that lot - but ask someone more up to date than me.

From personal experience (on my rig @ 1440x900) - GTA IV runs at 10FPS on all low (hence CPU bottle-necked), NFS shift plays at 30FPS at all high with 4xAA and Trilinear filtering (hence GPU bottleneck, I think).
In terms of graphics performance, an HD4890 is similar to (or better than) a GTX260. If you subbed a Quad into my PC, GTA IV would run on acceptably on medium or more, and Shift would probably do a little better too.

Really, your choice depends on what games you play (and your budget) - if you're running CPU-limited games like GTA with a tonne of objects, a CPU upgrade might show some benefit, whereas other current games will need more than one GTX260 to run maxed out comfortably.

If you're prepared to spend the money on i7 (including appropriate motherboard and RAM) it will make a difference in the long run.
I don't know the details of your financial situation, nor am I very up to date on intel's i range, so I'm afraid I can't tell you whether it's currently a good investment for you.

 

[sturmtruppe]

Please can someone clear this up for me, coz I don't beleive that intel is actually going to maintain 2 "families" of processor, right now as "an outsider looking in" sort of thing, it looks like 1366 is being neglected. From what ive read about 32nm, its all coming to i5 first.

 

[AMG]

i9 will be for that at a later date (2010)

than you got i3/i5 which are like the core 2 quads now, in fact its their replacement

intel will be maintaining the LGA775 till 2010, maybe longer I heard

 

[Farore]

Well, looks like I may as well hold out for the i9 range.

I think I will just spend some money on watercooling to make my PC silent.

Btw, it is worth having 4gb RAM in my system rather than 2gb?

 

[mdjmcnally]

OK but be prepared for Big Bucks spending.

 

[mdjmcnally]

Please can someone clear this up for me, coz I don't beleive that intel is actually going to maintain 2 "families" of processor, right now as "an outsider looking in" sort of thing, it looks like 1366 is being neglected. From what ive read about 32nm, its all coming to i5 first.

skt 1156 will be the mainstream and Intels moneymaker.

They won't neglect 1366 just that will move performance upwards to place a difference between the two sockets, likely to remove the i7 920 and not replace with a similar clock speed. The i7 920 is too closely matched by the high end i7 8x0 series so no need for it anymore. Intel can sell a high end P55 instead or if you insist on a x58/i7 system they will get more money from you.

It is standard for mainstream or less complex designs to be die shrunk first. Is quite common for lower end chips to be done as the learning process for the smaller silicon is cheaper with less wasted silicon. This is what ATI and Nvidia tend to do as well.

 

[Combat Fighter]

Still gonna go down the i7 920 route I think.

 

[Greebo]

According to Resident Evil 5 your Q6600 is already a bottleneck with gaming, it shows a significant improvement on i5/i7 even without HyperThreading:
.

I have a few problems with that link:

The resolution is only 1680 x 1050 with no aa or af. I know they picked this to show the biggest differences with cpus so it wasn't gpu dependant. Also they have done all the tests at 2.4Ghz. But who's to say that the op's q6600 running at 3.2 Ghz or more does no max out the framerates and matches the i7?

It has being accepted for some time that there is very little difference once you have you cpu running at 3.6Ghz in framerates so I would expect to see big differences at 2.4Ghz.

I will say that RE5 does finally make good use of quads but to use that review as a decision that your q6600 is a bottleneck is flawed IMO.

Wasn't the review based on the demo? Perhaps the OP should download the demo and run it at 2.4Ghz, 2.8Ghz and 3.2Ghz at his resolution and graphics card and see how much of difference the cpu speed makes. Ideally it would be great to get his cpu to 3.6Ghz as a final test as well.

 

[Greebo]

Well - the first question is whether 6600--> 9550 is worth it, and if not you ought to look at i5. There's some really good deals in that lot - but ask someone more up to date than me.

From personal experience (on my rig @ 1440x900) - GTA IV runs at 10FPS on all low (hence CPU bottle-necked), NFS shift plays at 30FPS at all high with 4xAA and Trilinear filtering (hence GPU bottleneck, I think).
In terms of graphics performance, an HD4890 is similar to (or better than) a GTX260. If you subbed a Quad into my PC, GTA IV would run on acceptably on medium or more, and Shift would probably do a little better too.

.

I actually suspect you are cpu limited in both games. With my GTX260 (similar perfomance to an 4890) and my Q9650 I get 30+ fps with everything on high in GTAIV (from memory, it may even be much higher than this, long time since I played it) and NFS shift plays silky smooth at 50 to 60 fps at all high and 2x AA, 16 x AF, trilinear filtering etc but at 1900 x 1200.