OC Quad Versus OC Corei7

kennyman

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Hi all,

I have seen many reviews on Corei7. I am saving to upgrade my current rig (P35+Q6600+GTS8800) shortly. I am wondering if there has been any articles published comparing a OC Quad (Q9650/9550/9450) versus an OC Corei7. I would really appreciate if you can send me a link. I am very curious to get a glimpse on how the OC Quad performs in task like encoding/gaming/benchmark etc. compare to the OC i7.
 

Silverion77

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Not even Close....Core i7 can OC to the levels of the Core 2 Quads with offering 4 extra "cores". Their not 4 extra physical cores, but it helps whoop Core2s butt
 

kennyman

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Thanks for you reply. Yes, you are right about the performance of 8 threads/4 Cores versus 4 threads/4 cores. But, I really want to see some benchmarks, this will help me to choose the right processor and mobo. Please let me know if Tom`s had any article covering this.
 

Silverion77

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Well really it depends on what u do...
In gaming, i7 really pulls ahead in multi gpu setups
Otherwise its locked into gpu performance anyways

But if u do things in video encoding, etc...then it might be worth.
I'm not sure if toms actually did a review. If not check xbitlabs or anandtech
 

kennyman

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Thanks all for your input. Really appreciate it! I did some testing today, I went to the nearest hardware shop and did some benchmark by myself with some of my friends. Time was limited and I couldn`t get my hands on some screenshots but I noted down some of the results and want to share with you.

Below are my findings:

PC1 - Asus P6T, Corei7 920@3.8 and 6Gb of DDR3 mem with GTX260
PC2 - Asus P45 deluxe, Q9650@4.2 and 8Gb of DDR3 mem with GTX260
PC3 - Asus P35 WIFI Deluxe, Q6600@3.4 and 2Gb of DDR3 mem with GTX8800 (my own pc)

I ran PCMarkVantage (only benchmark app installed on Asus p6t and p45), well..P6T destroyed both P35 and P45.

Now, interestingly, I load my Wmware with Vista 64 and start Vegas 8.1, both P6t and P45 were running Vista 64 with trial version of vegas 8.1. I rendered x-men III from mpeg II to mpeg4 (Sony AVC 1920x1080, 50i). Guess what??

1: Forget about my Q6600, both P6t and P45 finished rendering way before my Quad, shame on me!!....I stopped the rendering process.

2: P6T running all eight threads/4 cores (it was not at 100% thou, it looked like the cpu was running only at 75%) finished with total time 36 minutes.

3: NOW. old brother Q9650 well oc-ed at 4.2, running at 92-95% of CPU usage while rendering finished at 33 minutes.

Explanation I got from the folks at the store;

- Quad at 4.2 will beat Core i7 at 3.8, I must OC both at same speed to see the difference.
- HDD is different, I have 500GB Samsung, P6t has a WD Black (not sure what this means) and P45 has a seagate 1000GB.

Can anyone help me to understand what all this means? I don`t want to lie, but i am really a newbie when it comes to PC hardware, thus I decided to join toms` forum for knowledge. I thought Core i7 is best in rendering but ...does it depends on speed/oc? Please share give me your feedback.

*Apologies if my English is broken, I am french.

Thanks!!
 

smithereen

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The Core i7 is by far the most advanced processor ever created, but it has serious issues with single nVidia GPUs. Tom's did an article on it, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-280,2156-2.html Also, a lot of rendering programs are GPU-bottlenecked anyways, but not all.
Again, I'm not sure I'd bin the q6600 quite yet, maybe OC it some more with a good heatsink. A GPU upgrade might be more worth looking at, probably an ATI, as they have good Crossfire support on all decent chipsets. (P4X series, AMD 7XX series, X58) Don't let the benchmarks mislead you, though, the i7 is the fastest, by a long shot, just not always the most optimized, for gaming especially.