Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Edition Review
Published under Intel Core i7 Extreme
June 3, 2009 - Intel once again created history with the launch of their new Flagship processor Intel i7 Core 975 stealing the throne of the fastest processor on earth from its predecessor Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition. This was the much anticipated launch because, Intel has planned to price its new flagship processor at 999 USD (for thousand processors). This was also the price of the its predecessor Intel i7 Core 965 Extreme Edition.
Here is the quick look at the spectacular specifications of i7 Core 975 Extreme Edition.
- It performs at a steady speed of 3.33 GHz, which is almost 135 MHz more than Intel i7 Core 965 Extreme Edition.
- It delivers a dedicated 6.4 GT/s QPI which is also the fastest on Earth.
- This edition from Intel will feature unlocked multipliers as this too is a Extreme Edition Release. This simply means that you can overclock and get a performance you never saw anywhere, anytime.
And here follows the detailed technical analysis of the Big Boss as just adding three lines of praise is insulting its capability.
Intel i7 Core 975 Extreme Edition sports a whole range of improvements that has contributed immensely to its speed. Intel has now done away with the Old Fashioned FSB technology which could not deliver a bit over 800 MT/s. Though nothing out-of-the-blue, the QPI technology that was developed by AMD has been adopted by Intel in this new i7 Core Series and this has multiplied the speed of the data transfer between the processors by 8 times. i7 Core 975 has 4 physical cores. So basically this too is an Quad Core processor, but, with a minor update. The HT (Hyper-Threading) Technology that Intel used with its Pentium 4 Prescott series has been reused in these processors. This will allow 8 consecutive threads to be executed at any given time. This is a huge advantage for those professionals who use Multicore-aware software.
Intel has introduced a whole new set of Cache. L1 cache is still the same as it is in the Quad Core processors, L2 cache would be 256 kB per core - totalling to 1 MB of L2 Cache and i7 Core 975 Extreme Edition sports another "shared" L3 cache of 8 MB which has given a performance increase of 83% over the predecessors.
Since few years, Intel has been reducing its wafer size and here they are with their new 45 nm silicon wafer technology. This improvement has put them way ahead of AMD and other competitors in terms of speed, performance and efficiency. It has also helped Intel in reducing the normal TDP of the processor.
Intel i7 Core 975 Extreme Edition processor supports the LGA 1366 Socket and so the only motherboard that can be used with this processor is the x58 chipset. This in turn has another downside, it can only support DDR3 series of RAM and so it will not be backward compatible. The Core i7 (Nehalem) processor series is the first multi-core design from Intel to have its cores joined in a single die rather than to join multiple cores together.
In the conclusion, all you can say about a processor delivering 5.3 GHz of stable raw processing power in over-clocked mode is that once you switch over to it and you will never again think of another system again. Though, it can prove to be a heavy investment, it's worth a shot.
We will be covering a full fledged Benchmark test and will also evaluate the Graphics and Animation Rendering capabilities of Intel i7 Core 975 Extreme Edition in normal and over-clocked state, subscribe to our RSS feed to follow.
