sbeeze316 wrote:
and if you still don't believe me heres a link to some early synthetics, i don't like synthetic benches but its what we have for the time being
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU3NiwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
Synthetics are valid benches and do have a place in the grand scheme of things.
Superpi for example, allows one to test performance on an ever increasing level of hardware. The smaller runs are now exclusively the domain of the processor (L1, L2, L3) with larger runs eventually needing to access system memory.
My Q9450 at 3950 Mhz running the 16MB Superpi, is off by 40 seconds from the bench of an i7 965 at 4.0ghz. I doubt the extra 50Mhz would make up that 40 second difference. That 40 seconds difference is a significant gain.
Gaming benchmarks on the other hand are a different beast. Most state "best played on Intel", or "best viewed on ATI", really are an unfair comparison because those games have optimized code specific to that processor or video card.
For the i7, just about all of the leaked benchmarks online are showing Engineering Samples of the processor and running on boards which have not been finalized. We get this from the hardware whores and pimps whenever 'new' is about to happen.
We see in many of the benchmarks for the i7 to indeed be an excellent performer with only further gains to be had through retail core stepping and retail motherboards with a production bios.
The fact is, whatever you're running right now is obsolete, and will be officially obsolete on 17 Nov when the new socket is officially released.
Clarke, if you have nothing to worry about the i7, then why expire your 3DMark06 benchmark on 15 Nov?