Testing Methodology and System Setup
Highlighted from our previous Lynnfield review:The release of Intel’s new Lynnfield processors comes well timed near
the release of the upcoming Windows 7 operating system and as such you
will see we have migrated the entire lineup of benchmarks and testing
from Vista to Windows 7 for this review. The move was completely
painless – every benchmark and application ran 100% as we expected it
to and with the same amount of stability and reliability we had come to
find under Vista, if not better! I tested it all using the 64-bit
variant of the RTM version found on our TechNet subscription.
For our testing purposes, we obviously pitted the new Core i7-870 and Core i5-750 (and now Core i7-860) against the most appropriate hardware we had around. On the list were the Core i7-975 and Core i7-920 processors; this allows us to compare Lynnfield to both the FASTEST desktop CPU on the market today (i7-975) and to by far the most popular Nehalem CPU available (i7-920). From Intel’s Core 2 line I selected the Q9650 processor as it is the fastest Core 2 Quad part available today as well as the Q8400 since its price point matches up perfectly with that of the $199 Core i5-750. Finally, AMD is represented solely by the Phenom II X4 965 – the company’s fastest desktop CPU offering.
For our testing purposes, we obviously pitted the new Core i7-870 and Core i5-750 (and now Core i7-860) against the most appropriate hardware we had around. On the list were the Core i7-975 and Core i7-920 processors; this allows us to compare Lynnfield to both the FASTEST desktop CPU on the market today (i7-975) and to by far the most popular Nehalem CPU available (i7-920). From Intel’s Core 2 line I selected the Q9650 processor as it is the fastest Core 2 Quad part available today as well as the Q8400 since its price point matches up perfectly with that of the $199 Core i5-750. Finally, AMD is represented solely by the Phenom II X4 965 – the company’s fastest desktop CPU offering.
We used the ASUS Maximus III Formula
motherboard for all our Lynnfield testing and it proved not only to be
a stable basis from which to gauge the CPUs success, but also a great
overclocker in our quick and dirty testing.
The
move to Lynnfield did mean we had to revisit another test setup issue
from the first Nehalem review – memory capacities. Since Nehalem uses
a triple-channel memory we need either 3GB (3 x 1GB) or 6GB (3 x 2GB)
configurations compared to the dual-channel memory controllers on the
Lynnfield, Core 2 and Phenom test beds. In the end the resolution was
the same: Nehalem gets 6GB of memory and the other competitors get 4GB
of memory as it seemed like the most likely configurations our readers
and end users would be using.
It had actually been a while since I had done any extensive CPU testing, and with the move to a new operating system, decided to update our benchmark suite to all the latest application versions available as well as add in a couple new ones (7-Zip compression and Left 4 Dead, for example). As for gaming testing, I took some feedback from our readers and decided to include BOTH low resolution testing like 1024×768 to see CPU scaling results as well as include much more real-world resolutions like 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 to see how these CPUs will actually affect gaming.
So how does this middle-of-the-road processor fit into the world of Lynnfield, Nehalem, Phenom and Core 2? Let’s take a look at the benchmarks!
