Date:
Monday , September 07, 2009
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Intel Lynnfield Core i5 and Core i7 Processors

Intel today launches its new Lynnfield processor based on its tremendously dominant Nehalem architecture. New Lynnfield processors bring with them a new socket that commands a new series of motherboards and both are very much on track to capture a huge share of the enthusiast computer hardware market.

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Gaming Benchmarks

As always, these benchmarks in no way represent real-world gameplay. They are all run at very low resolutions to try our best to remove the video card as a bottleneck. I will not hesitate to say that anyone spouting these types of framerate measurements as a true measuring tool in today’s climate is not servicing your needs or telling you the real truth.

The gaming tests below have been put together to focus on the processor power exhibited by each system. All the tests below consist of custom time demos built with stressing the CPU in mind. So much specialized coding comes into the programming now days we suggest that looking at gaming performance by using real-world gameplay is the only sure way to know what you are going to get with a specific game. Our Real World Gameplay CPU Scaling would be a great place to start.

Lost Planet

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When it comes to multi-threading, it is hard to find a better gaming benchmark than Lost Planet. It is also worth keeping in mind that it is about the only game engine on the planet that can show you this sort of CPU scaling across the cores.

We see HyperThreading impact our scores here by a pretty good bit. Lost Planet also seems to like our Core i7 X58 chipset based system by a slight margin. In this comparison, we do have both our Core i7 systems utilizing x16 PCIe connections so that should not be the difference. Also, we see this gaming benchmark give a slight advantage to memory footprint as well when moved to tripchan/6GB on the Core i7-920 on our X58 motherboard.

Phenom II, dead last.

Quake 4

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This particular version of Quake 4 does claim to have some multithreading abilities, but they are very limited as you can see. What is of great interest here is that our Core i5-750 system actually wins out over our similar Core i7 systems. I see it talked about a lot in our forums that "I turn HyperThreading off to get better performance," and this seems to one time that it might be SLIGHTLY true.

The Phenom II does manage to best the slower clocked Core i5 and Core i7 processors in Quake 4 though.

FarCry 2

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FarCry 2 is another gaming title that seems to not care much about HyperThreading as all of our Core i5 and Core i7 systems come in pretty much even. Again we see some give and take as to whether it actually favors one processor over the other.

Again we see Phenom II dead last even compared to the slower clocked Core i5 and Core i7 processors.

Crysis SP 64-bit Demo

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We once again see scaling that is very familiar to us and very much like what we are seeing in FarCry 2 above. Most games that you play this year will fall into the "FarCry 2 / Crysis" category as far as CPU utilization is concerned.