The Intel Core i7 860 Review

by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST

PAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance

Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive

Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.

Data Recovery - par2cmdline 0.4 Multithreaded

Our Par2 test actually puts both the 860 and 870 slightly ahead of the Core i7 975. It's clear that anything faster than a Core i5 750 in this case basically performs about the same. It looks like we're starting to be bottlenecked by our SSD.

Microsoft Excel 2007

Excel can be a very powerful mathematical tool. In this benchmark we're running a Monte Carlo simulation on a very large spreadsheet of stock pricing data.

Microsoft Excel 2007 SP1 - Monte Carlo Simulation

Sony Vegas Pro 8: Blu-ray Disc Creation

Although technically a test simulating the creation of a Blu-ray disc, the majority of the time in our Sony Vegas Pro benchmark is spend encoding the 25Mbps MPEG-2 video stream and not actually creating the Blu-ray disc itself.

Sony Vegas Pro 8 - Blu-ray Disc Image Creation (25Mbps MPEG-2)

Again the Core i7 860 pulls slightly ahead of the 920 and falls short of the 870, right where we'd expect it to land.

Sorenson Squeeze: FLV Creation

Another video related benchmark, we're using Sorenson Squeeze to convert regular videos into Flash videos for use on websites.

Sorenson Squeeze Pro 5 - Flash Video Creation

The 860 and the 920 keep trading positions, but as you'd expect given the similar price points - the two perform about the same.

WinRAR - Archive Creation

Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:

WinRAR 3.8 Compression - 300MB Archive

3D Rendering Performance Gaming Performance
Comments Locked

121 Comments

View All Comments

  • DigitalFreak - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    He's the troll formerly known as snakeoil. Just ignore him and he'll go away.
  • the zorro - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    why, did you ran out of arguments?
  • strikeback03 - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link

    No, just following this proverb

    "Do not argue with a fool, those watching may not know the difference between you and he"
  • DigitalFreak - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Arguing with someone who is clearly delusional is pointless. On the other hand, if you're mentally retarded then you have my sympathy.
  • Troll Trolling - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Ok, let's do your way.
    In the magic lands of Ecualia, there was a magic blacksmith cyclope, he forged the Core i7 860 such way it would be better than BloomField.

    Beat my argument troll.
  • the zorro - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    the story is even worst than that:
    somewhere at satan clara's intel's HQ the evil orcs at intel decided that free overclocking was not profitable so they decided to create the turbo crap story, and call it a 'feature' so this way they would use all available overclocking headroom in the cpu and begin charging for it.
    so they are killing free overclocking for intel users.
    now you have to pay for overclocking because lynnfield turbo overclocking is consuming all the overclocking ability of the cpu
    now intel can make this turbo overclocking more aggressive in some cpus and charge more for it.

    but there is another problem because intel's orcs betrayed the evil nvidia warlock who sweared revenge and now intel cpus are underperforming when paired with an nvida graphics card.
  • SpaceRanger - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    We gotta get a "Do Not Feed The Trolls" sign for the end of every page posted here at Anandtech.
  • jordanclock - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Not really... Just look at the numbers. The i5 750 is outperforming the PII 965 in almost every case. And when the 965 pulls ahead, it's not enough to justify the increase in price and huge increase in power draw.
  • Eeqmcsq - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    > Not really... Just look at the numbers. The i5 750 is outperforming the PII 965 in almost every case
    ... when given room to Turbo. When not given room to Turbo, then the winner is...? Based on the limited number of Turbo off benchmarks available, my theory is that the i5 750 will fall below the 965 with no room to Turbo. I'm not completely convinced yet that the i5 750 is the definitive winner over the 965. CPU comparison's aren't that clearcut anymore with the variableness of Turbo mode.

    On a side note, I do agree the price tag of the 965 is certainly too high, even if the 965 is hypothetically better than the 750 under heavy load. Maybe AMD is fighting the 750 with the slightly lower priced PII 955, which anyone can multiplier bump into a 965.
  • yacoub - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    How many of you trolls are there? Turbo is on by default, so the end user is going to have the advantage of it all the time. The only reason benchmarks were run without Turbo is for the three of you out there who are going to turn it off... no wait, you're not even going to buy it in the first place because you're just here to troll.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now