Hey everyone. Today, Core i7 became available in most Western countries. I'm in the USA, and of course my retailer of choice has it up.

Core i7 920 2.66GHz -- $295
Core i7 940 2.93GHz -- $570
Core i7 EE 965 3.2GHz -- $1030

MSI X58 Platinum -- $221
Gigabyte EX58-DS4 -- $245
Intel DX58SO -- $259
Biostar TPower X58 -- $270
Foxconn Renaissance -- $278
Supermicro MBD-C7X58-O -- $280
Gigabyte EX58-UD5 -- $299
Asus P6T Deluxe -- $300
EVGA X58-A1 -- $300
Supermicro MBD-X8SAX-O -- $300
Gigabyte EX58-Extreme -- $329
Asus P6T Deluxe/OC Palm -- $339
MSI X58 Eclipse -- $353
Asus Rampage II Extreme -- $399

Do note that the prices of motherboards and processors are competitive with what they're set to replace. Compare X58 motherboards to X48 motherboards, and Core i7 to Core 2 Quad Q9___. Only DDR3 prices send pain: about triple the cost per gigabyte.

History
16 Nov 2008 -- Put this up
19 Nov 2008 -- Updated for EVGA A1 X58, Core i7 920 & 940 dropped $10
20 Nov 2008 -- Updated for Foxconn X58, Core i7 920 & 940 dropped another $10.
05 Dec 2008 -- Updated for Biostar X58, price drops.

Woot, fastest processors in existence for the win!

Fixed.

I found out too that I'm in the standings to win the Gigabyte EX58-Extreme and 3 sticks of DDR3. That being said, I can ask for an i7 920 for Christmas, or money to buy one.

x86 was implied.

£300 for the proccesor.... £300 for the board. Hopefully prices will drop soon would LOVE to pick one of these babies up in jan/feb

Ouch on those prices. If I get the Gigabyte EX58-Extreme, I'll sell it for the Core i7 920 and ask for the MSI X58 Platinum for Christmas. Or the other way around--keep the Gigabyte EX58-Extreme and ask for a Core i7 920.

It's a shame the exchange rates aren't so favourable now, they look really nice apart from the price. Can't say I will be looking at upgrading my computer for a good couple of years though.

Stobbo: can you kill your signature? I had enough of Obama '08 and McCain '08 to last me the next 4 years.

Anyways--I am definitely considering an upgrade. Core i7 crushes Core 2 Quad in AutoCAD and in other super-intensive programs.

I was going to last night but run out of time. Give me a minute.


I've got an Athlon X2

It does me though, as I pretty much only use Office and Firefox.

Thanks.

Anyways--I'd see the benefits of Core i7 immediately: I crunch 24/7 and doing it on all cores makes it a pretty intensive thing to do. Anyways--DDR3 is what restricts entry--$70/2gb is a bit... steep.

I'll wait to see what AMD rolls out

Its not much better than the current quad core for gaming

And the mobo costs almost as much as the processor.

Plus DDR3 is minimum it will support.

This looks amazing. Ill be waiting till around march for the prices to go down a bit then im going to buy/build my machine with one of these baby's in it.

It's not much better than the Core 2 Quad?

Go look up Core i7 vs. Core 2 Quad somewhere online, they are very different.

That's in heavily multithreaded applications like photoshop.

Alot of games are still barely threaded for quad cores.

So the 8 cores really give no or little performance gain

I never said it wasn't much better just so far not much for gamers for video editors and people using photoshop sure.

Theirs articles on that as well

I honestly don't need the i7, as my applications don't have much need for it. I find it very interesting, however, and I would assume that my friend's father will pick it up something next year, and I could test it out with whatever.

The processor prices are competitive. (Compare to current C2Qs) The motherboard prices are competitive. (Compare to current X48 boards) The RAM prices are NOT competitive enough. $35+/gigabyte is too much for most people.

But in this case, if you're going for this CPU, you'll be willing to spend that extra money. This isn't for your casual computer enthusiast.
I actually have 2GB of DDR3. Of course it's going to be expensive because it is still relatively new and un-refined whereas DDR2 has been out for awhile. DDR3 allows a lot faster memory access and can easily get you 2x the speed of most DDR2 sticks, of course it's going to be more expensive.


To be honest, most people don't.

What popular games and applications support these multiprocessors? anything yet?

Only crysis atm and that doesn't even utilize all of them I believe

Supreme Commander is a major one. Other then that, professional and other heavy-duty applications. Most modern CADs, 3D design, rendering, folding (like Folding@Home), crunching (like World Community Grid), Photoshop and the like, media encoding, and compression software (WinRAR, for example) to name a few. Not many games take advantage of multi-core processors, especially as these new Core i7's are quad-core with an improved HyperThreading enabled. Gaming, it matches or exceeds C2Q. In media work, it exceeds by far C2Q.

Would these high games still work as good as a single processor or does the added processors mess them up?

They'd work on single-core processors, but they're currently best accelerated by dual-processor quad-core processors. 8 cores. Core i7 isn't as fast a pair of Harpertowns--that's true--but it's cheaper. Anyways--Supreme Commander uses that power and many programs worth rewriting to multi-thread have great improvements--quite often with 80-90% performance boosts when cores are doubled.

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/con...&lid=681191
Dell's just released their Studio desktop with the new core.
I'm actually impressed by the price on this.

Dell makes most of there own parts though.

It starts at $949, which is just amazing.

They're still poorly balanced for gamers. $200 upgrade for a HD4850? wtf? A HD4850 is $150 these days. No memory card reader ($20 upgrade)? And why the old 16x DVD burners still? For $950, it's not really that bad. However, they still incur sales tax, take over a week to ship, and probably lack in the power supply category. Overall, I'll stick to my own.

Deal time!
http://www.pinkfriday.org/page/2/

Core i7 920 processor for $150
Intel DX58SO motherboard for $135
EVGA GeForce 9800GTX+ for $90

The site to see all the deals is http://www.pinkfriday.org/

If you are fortunate to live near a CompUSA, get early and wait for them to announce what's being sold. Stand near what you want or are interested in. I won't be able to, though I'll be watching this with great anticipation and hopefully nearly $400.

Well Dell's still gotta make some money on the computers. You pay the premium price for assembly, insurance, etc.

You pay for assembly and advertising. You receive a fraction the insurance. Dell and any other major company is immaculate in corporate and industrial service. You request a part and it arrives, paperwork is taken care of by your rep, and you have actual support you can call and talk to on a moment's notice.

Anyways--as I said, they're decent for the price. A "premium" setup with 6GB DDR3 and the HD4850-512 is an excellent deal.

All these statistics about power consumption and speed don't really mean much to me since I don't really know anything about this area of computing, so can anyone tell me what's the difference between this new processor and the current ones on the market. Whats so special about it and how does it speed compare?

Basically,

1) Less power consumed for the performance. You should be able to draw an equal amount of electricity and have it perform better.

2) It's a next-generation quad-core processor. Intel changed a good number of things around--they have moved the memory controller so that it is part of the processor now. They have optimized and enabled HyperThreading, which allows up to 8 threads to run at once. The positive aspect of this is that the higher the demand, the better the performance. 8 threads at 100% will complete faster than two sets of 4 threads at 100% (crunching numbers.)

3) Compared to like-processors, these at least match the prior performance. When you look into more numbers-heavy applications (not really gaming, but professional work), the additional bandwidth given by using a new bus (QuickPath Interface) and the on-die (integrated into CPU) MC (memory controller) can cause some serious performance boosts. In the amount of 5-10% boosts, which was basically unheard of until now.

4) nVidia is now licensing SLI to Intel or selling an additional chip (nForce 200) to enable SLI on these motherboards.