Intel's new quad-core i7 processors. How things have changed!

Intel's new quad-core i7 processors were developed and released as the successors to their highly successful line of Core 2 Duo processors.

My younger brother recently upgraded his computer with a new motherboard, processor and RAM. The hard drive, optical drives, and video card were taken from his old computer. The power supply came from MY computer. This is because his power supply lacked a 2x4 power connector for the motherboard whereas mine did, so we swapped.

An observation I made though that I found to be interesting was that the pins for the processor were not actually on the bottom of the processor, but they were actually (as it appeared) on the motherboard itself. This was actually a relief seeing as once in the past I had a processor pin get bent which would usually mean it's scrap. For those of you who don't know, bending just one pin on a processor messes it up for good. I was VERY lucky and was able to bend it back and it worked. Needless to say though, without a ton of pins on the underside of the core i7, I didn't feel as nervous handling it. But what's nuts is that the thing fits into what is designated is an LGA 1366 slot. Know why? Because the thing contacts 1366 pins on the motherboards. Wow. That's already a lot more than the pins found on LGA 775 slots used for Intel's Core 2 Duo processors.

So we got things working and the computer was up and running. The first thing we tried was Left 4 Dead because it crashed constantly on his old system. How did it perform? Well, with 6 GB of ram (32-bit Vista using only about 3.3 GB of it, waiting to get Vista 64-bit sometime soon), an ATI Radeon HD 4850, and of course that new 2.66 GHz quad-core processor, the performance was nothing short of amazing. NOTHING could be done to slow the computer down. No amount of zombies, gunfire, and/or explosions seemed to do anything to the framerate. Granted, the Source engine is getting pretty old, it is still looking pretty good considering its age and delivers some good visuals.

My computer with its relatively wimpy Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and its NVidia GTX 260 (216 core) runs L4D really well too, but nowhere close to the degree of smoothness found from my brother's new computer.

Next up, my brother tried out Crysis, THE game that people strive to run well on their systems. Running at a rather 'high' resolution for the game (1440x900) and with all detail settings at high, the game ran very well. Better than it does on my computer at 1024x768 and the graphics set to medium. I could only imagine what Crysis Warhead would look like with its better-optimized version of the graphics engine used in Crysis.

For about $300 bucks to buy in to the the Nehalem microarchitecture Core i7, I'd say it's worth every penny. Prices are only going to go down from this point too, so I look forward to having some money saved up to possibly get one myself. The downside though is that motherboards that will support this processor are on the expensive side, with the cheapest one I found being about $200. Add in the fact that you may need to purchase a good power supply that has a 2x4 12v power connector for the motherboard and you may be spending an additional $100. That makes a total of about $600 right now just for a power supply, motherboard, and processor. I built a pretty good computer on Newegg.com for that price not too long ago (case, power supply, CPU, RAM, hard drive, motherboard, video card, optical drives, everything).

Since I don't exactly know where I'll need to be spending money though in the foreseeable future though, I'll be holding off on this upgrade for perhaps a VERY long time. My current machine runs just fine anyway.

I'm thoroughly impressed with Intel's offerings right now. I've unfortunately not had the chance to try out a Core 2 Duo processor (except on my laptop) for gaming, but I can only imagine how much better it would be than the AMD sitting inside my computer right now.

And to see how my old Radeon HD4850 ran in my brother's computer, I honestly in some ways regret not researching the snazzy Radeon HD4870 1024MB more. Some benchmarks put the card very close to my current card, an NVidia GTX 260 (core 216). To be honest, I found my ATI cards in the past to be less prone to crashing though. Since I've picked up the GTX 260, I've had some random crashes to the desktop and even some blue screens randomly. It crashed when I turned on anisotropic filtering in Left 4 Dead. Needless to say, that option got turned off. The error I got was traced back to the video card's drivers. It's a bit disappointing. The performance is great, but the crashing isn't. It really doesn't happen much at all though. It's only happened probably less than the number of times I can count on one hand, but it's still not as good as the Radeon HD4850's crash count where I didn't even need to start counting.

Anyway, I'd say that Intel is without a doubt the brand to go with for processors, whether you're gaming or running development applications, etc. AMD's quad-core Phenom processors can't even compare, they wouldn't even do too well compared to some of Intel's dual-core processors either. I would honestly like to see AMD do better though, as I like having more options and their processors have never really caused any problems for me either.

It seems to me that since AMD and ATI's merger, it's been the graphics end that's been doing better. But the video cards between ATI and NVidia are still more or less of a toss up for me. They both have really good offerings. It just comes down to what a person wants to buy. It's not like the 'days of old' where the Radeon 9700 Pro or Radeon 9800 Pro were the clear leaders.

And wow, that makes me think that things have changed a lot since then. My brother was talking about how the Nehalem architecture in the core i7 processor was 'revolutionary'. I remember when having a processor with one core that did 64-bit processing was 'revolutionary'. Hell, I can remember when my older brother and I were excited about an old Dell with a Pentium II that had a 450 MHz processor (the thing looked like a miniature VHS tape), 256 MB of RAM (I think), and a 13 GB hard drive (which, by the way, did a good job running Counter-Strike). Of course, Intel came out with the Pentium III 500 MHz processor the month after we got it. Now they give you four cores that can all do 64-bit processing in something the same size. Geeze. I sound like a computer nerd equivalent of an elderly person.

Just goes to show, technology keeps moving. Just as you upgrade something better will always come out to spite you. I've had this happen to me before, but thankfully it hasn't happened to me yet since I upgraded my video card. Fortunately I decided against getting a new motherboard and processor in the last quarter of last year. Then again, if you buy computer hardware at any time, it's bound to become ancient history in about six months to a year.

I should point out though, processor speeds haven't actually getting faster in the consumer market. The architecture of the processors is what's changing as well as the number of cores. Companies are starting to do more with processor architecture rather than going for raw speed.

-G&G Allen

To-Do List:
-Is Honda going the way of Toyota?
-Fanboys and their belief that they all have the best thing since sliced bread. Who's right?
-Why I think GM did it all wrong.
-Game copy protection, what I think is the best way
-The Porsche Cayman, why it's not that great of a car (even though I say it is... what?)