Testing Setup and Benchmarks Used
Our testing methods remained essentially identical to those used in our first Nehalem review from November. The only difference was a new motherboard that Gigabyte sent along for our evaluation, the EX58-EXTREME; which is exactly as the name implies.Steve has already been sent the EX58-EXTREME and would have a full review up and ready next week.
Also included in our testing was the new OCZ Blade-series of DDR3 memory that supports speeds up to 2125 MHz for some great overclocking headroom.
We are still including much of our previous testing suite but have updated it all to the latest available versions and have added in a few new ones as well. A fluid dynamics simulation was added in the form of Euler3D, VirtualDub has been updated to include SSE2 and SSE4 results, a new rendering test known as Blender has entered the fray and one of my new favorite “toy” applications called Microsoft Image Composite Editor was thrown in there as well. MS ICE is a program that allows you to take any number of related images and “stitch” them together to create a single panoramic photo.
The Intel Core i7-975 consistent ran at 3.5 GHz with Turbo Mode enabled
Our gaming tests for the CPU portion of this launch are focused on low resolution, high speed, CPU-bound gaming scenarios. 3DMark Vantage was of course included but we have added in World in Conflict, Crysis and the newly released Far Cry 2.
Overall I think you will find the collection of 19 benchmarks applications with 35 overall tests to be quite complete.
** Edit: Oops! Add in the Core i7-975 EE to those tables…mistakes are harder to correct while in Taiwan!