I5 or I7

[James Harring]

Originally Posted by Paul Kepen

Where did you find benchmarks comparing the 860 to the 920?

I looked on Tom's Hardware, but they were comparing an 870 to the 920. The 870 is a $560 chip, versus the more comparably priced 860.

Right here:
AnandTech Bench (beta): Intel Core i7 860 vs Intel Core i7 920

[Paul Kepen]

Thanks James for the link. Looks like there pretty darn close, but the lower power consumption and heatt would definitely have to tip the scale in favor of the 860 :)

[Jeff Harper]

Heat and power is really not an issue with the 920 unless you overclock. What's up with the concern over power consumption, the electric bill? Nevertheless, it's the upgrade path that is, IMO much more important than these things.

I personally am not aware of what is coming, but the coming Gulftown processor sounds very nice from what little I've read about it.

Also keep in mind the 920 is much easier to overclock than the 860 with the simple addition of a good cpu fan. On the other hand, as Jon M said, if you're not an overclocker, the 860 would be a great choice.

[Jeff Harper]

Below is a link to the new 1156 MOBO from Asus that features USB 3.0, sounds interesting. Seems to be an amazing board...

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.

[Vito DeFilippo]

Good catch, Jeff. I'll add that to the list. I've been waiting for USB3 and SATA6 to arrive before upgrading to the i7 860.

Gigabyte has announced no less than 7 new boards with the same upgrades:

GIGABYTE 333 Onboard Acceleration

Can't wait!

[Harm Millaard]

Let's make it clear that there is no discernable difference in price or performance between the i7-860 and the i7-920. The differences are in the socket and what it entails:

1. P55 motherboards are less expensive than X58 motherboards.
2. P55 motherboards have no PCI-e slots free to use with raid controllers or other cards.
3. Overclock capabilities at stock voltages is very limited with the i7-860.
4. Support for QPI has been abolished with the i7-860.
5. P55 is limited to 16 PCI-e lanes, X58 has 36 lanes.
6. X58 is fully compatible with the new hex-core Gulftown, P55 is not.
7. P55 is limited to 4 memory slots, X58 has 6 memory slots.

Intel has a reason to brand the i7-860 as main stream and the i7-920 as high performance. IMO on an editing rig, limiting PCI-e expansion capabilities, limiting video options, limiting memory capabilities and limiting upgrade capabilities (Gulftown) are severe drawbacks, not easily offset by a lower electricity bill or a few degrees lower temperature.

[Jeff Harper]

Harm, the Asus board above has free 2 PCIe slots, unless I'm misunderstanding something in your post. Additionally, overclocking is certainly not as simple with the 1156, but not a dealbreaker, IMO.

The advantages of Sata 6 Gb/s and USB 3 for early adopters are also not to be overlooked. Number of memory slots that you mention is a bit of a downer, but DDR2 is cheaper anyway, is it not? So you buy 4 X 4GB sticks instead of 6 2x sticks, I don't see a huge disadvantage.

I run the 920, and while the Gulftown sounds great, my understanding is prices will begin at $1K plus. Not exactly something small-time operators like me will be waiting in line for. Sure prices will drop, but how long will it take for a $1k processor to drop to >$500 level?

[Harm Millaard]

Jeff,

The X58 has support for 36 PCI-e lanes, in any configuration, the P55 only 16 lanes all used by the embedded graphics chip.

Admitted there is support for PCI-e 1x slots on the P55, but that is useless for any serious card and certainly for a raid controller.

[Jeff Harper]

Harm, the Asus board has 2x PCIex16 Slots. If you're talking about the Gigabyte boards, I think I would lean towards the Asus anyway. At any rate I'm quite happy with my 1366. I would hope for early adopters that they would release a 1366 MOBO with the newer USB and SATA connectors, which would be the best of both worlds.

[Vito DeFilippo]

Dammit, Harm, just when I had decided on the 860, you get me thinking about the 920 again.

All the reviews I read suggest that there are no major real-world differences in performance between the two. Can you expand a bit on the disadvantages of the 1156 platform?

For example, perhaps I don't need a dedicated raid card if SATA6 has such better performance. And what do you mean about integrated graphics on a CPU? I can't find any relevant info on that.

There's so much contradictory info, it's hard to decide. Here's a summary I just checked out:

"core i7 920
Clock speed 2.66
QPI 4.8 GT/s
Triple Channel memory
Trubo boost, increases the clock speed by 133 mhz.
X16 PCI Express and 2X16 for sli or crossfire 4X8 for quad
Uncore speed, 2.13 (max is 1066 DDR3 Ram) However this can be overclocked easy.
Supports HyperThreading Techonolgy, 4 cores each with 2 thread's = 8

Core i7 860
Clock speed 2.8
DMI: i'll explain a little about this, now in the previus core i7's, they had Quick path (QPI) to get connected with the Northbridge that had the PCI controller on it, but on the new core i7 870, the PCI controller is on Die on the CPU it self, therefor there is no need for a northbridge connection, because everything goes direct to the cpu to reduce latency, thats a pro for core i7 860 not a con btw
Dual Channel memory
Trubo boost, increases the clock speed by about 600 mhz.
X16 PCI Express and 2X8 for sli or crossfire
Uncore speed, 2.40 (max is 1333 DDR3 Ram) However this can be overclocked easy.
Supports HyperThreading Techonolgy, 4 cores each with 2 thread's = 8

to make this more simple, i'll explain about the pros and cons.

Core i7 920 has better memory bandwidth than both core core i7 860 and core i5 750, however core i7 860 and core i5 750 have better clock speed because of the better turbo.

Now here is where it gets tricky. Because the core i7 860 has an on-die PCI Controller supporting X16, it will perform better when using a SINGLE GPU card, however if you want to sli then Core i7 920 will do better at sli because it supports 2X16 for sli while i7 860 2x8 for sli. In other words you will get more bandwidth if using sli on X58 motherboard, but will have better performance if doing single GPU on P55 motherboard because of the pci controller on the cpu.

so if you wanna get a system without sli or upgrading, then core i5 or core i7 860 is better and cheaper.

but if your looking forword to sli and upgrade in the future, then core i7 920 with x58 motherboard will be better for you."


So this guy is saying the QPI situation is actually BETTER for the 860.

It's tough, because most of the reviews and opinions are by and for gamers, which I am not. For example, I have no interest in sli. As for OpenCL, I don't work in Maya or AutoCAD. Does it make any difference for video editing?

Thanks as always.

[Harm Millaard]

Jeff,

Can you explain these architectural differences in relation to ASUS claim?

[Jeff Harper]

Nope, I don't understand it.

[Harm Millaard]

Vito, I will get back to your very valid questions, but first to the architecture of the P55 versus the X58.

The X58 has 36 PCI-e lanes, that can be configured as the mobo manufacturers want. So you have for instance one PCI-e 16x, two PCI-e 8x and a single PCI-e 4x slot or you can have 2 PCI-e 16x slots and a single PCI-e 4x slot, all amounting to 36 lanes.

Usually you will have one PCI-e slot for a video card at PCI-e 16x, leaving you with only 20 lanes for expansion. That is quite enough for a PCI-e 8x raid controller or other cards, even a second PCI-e 16x video card in SLI configuration and an additional PCI-e 4x raid controller.

The P55 has only 16 lanes. These can be used in a single slot or in a dual PCI-e 8x slot configuration. Now, if you want to have the same video capability as an X58, all your lanes are used. There may be additional physical slots on the mobo, but the chipset does not have any more lanes available, unless you downgrade the video card from 16x to 8x.

So here is the major drawback of the P55. And Vito, you are correct, I mistakenly mentioned integrated graphics, that is plain wrong (Westmere does that), but the bottom line is that if you want to use a 16x PCI-e card for video, all your lanes are used up and you have no more expansion capability, due to the ingetrated PCI-e bus. My bad.
Sorry.

The P55 does allow 2 video cards in SLI configuration, but only as dual PCI-e 8x cards, which means a performance penalty hit. It still does not allow a raid controller to be added, due to the lack of available lanes on the chip.

[Jeff Harper]

Harm, I installed and ran host raid controllers (Adaptec 1225 and 1430) on my LGA 775 board almost 2 years ago for over a year (and still run them on my current board). They are 4x (maybe less, I don't remember) I believe and transfer files at about 100 to 150 Mbps drive depending on the drive.

Why wouldn't they run on a board that is two years newer and fairly feature rich? I don't understand why 1366 boards cannot run raid controllers.

What am I missing here? I don't know much about computers, but this is especially confusing to me.

[Harm Millaard]

Jeff,

I use an Areca ARC-1680iX-12, which is a PCI-e 8x board with the IOP 348 chip and it gives me an average transfer rate of 853 MB/s.

These kind of boards can ONLY run on X58 boards, not on P55 boards due to the lack of PCI lanes.