Intel Core i7 processor review

Topping things out is the inevitably expensive 965 Extreme Edition. It costs a cool £1,000, runs at 3.2GHz and adds a few overclocking-friendly features such as an unlocked multiplier. All three chips have 8MB of L3 cache and support up to 24GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 memory.

Exceeded expectations

But what about performance? In truth, our expectations weren't all that high. Mainly, that's because Intel's existing Core 2 processors are so damn good, it was hard to imagine anything significantly bettering them much less blowing them away.

Of course, the Core i7 cares not a jot about our preconceptions. In our multi-threaded benchmarks, it duly proceeds to beat the Core i7 to a bloody, whimpering pulp. It's around 60 per cent quicker in the X264 video encode test than the best Core 2 processor, for example. That's almost silly.

While its superiority isn't always that spectacular, a performance advantage of around 40 to 50 per cent is typical in most multi-threaded applications including image rendering and media encoding of various types.

As for how AMD's Phenom compares, it's an absolute massacre. Intel's finest is now often twice as quick as the best AMD can deliver.

That said, the Core i7's single-threaded performance is a bit less impressive. It seems the individual cores aren't a major advance on the Core 2 architecture. Likewise, it's a little disappointing to note that power consumption has gone up a fraction.

We had been lead to believe that greater feature integration would have the opposite effect. Finally, HyperThreading appears to occasionally have negative effect on performance when only a handful of CPU-intensive threads are being processed.

But those reservations are pretty small beer compared to the performance smörgåsbord the Core i7 cranks out most of the time.