Intel Core i7 870 reviewed

First leaked benchmarks show good performance from the new "Lynnfield" core.

PC Online China has reviewed the upcoming Intel Core i7 870 for the LGA 1156 socket, which is expected to debut at $562 around September.
The new Core i7 has a clockspeed of 2.93GHz with Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz. Part of the processor are 8MB of shared L3 cache and 256KB of L2 cache per core, coupled with a dual channel DDR3 controller.


Performance in games will be greater than the Core i7 920 for LGA 1366 platforms due to the higher clockspeed. The extra bandwidth helps the i7 920 keep above the Core i5 750 but not by much. I would expect that benchmarks in Unreal Engine 3 based games, like UT3, to show a more distinct advantage, possibly bringing it to the i7 870 territory, due to the way that the engine better utilizes memory bandwidth. UT3 is one of the few games that really likes DDR3, whereas other games don't show a big boost when going from DDR2.

More of the same in real world and synthetic benchmarks.

The said bandwidth advantage

The lack of hyperthreading in the Core i5 hurts it here.

Same story.

Super Pi is mainly computational bound and single threaded - it is then clockspeed bound, churning out predictable results.

The Core i7 870, if the $562 pricing rumor is true, will be a grossly overpriced processor. With the Core i7 920 delivering close to the same performance in games and not lagging behind much in the rest, it's price of around $250 will surely be an extra motivation. Even if decent $100 LGA 1156 motherboards are made available for purchase when "Lynnfield" debuts in September, that's still a very big difference in price. Take notice that the LGA 1366 platform is expected to support the upcoming "Westmere" based hexa-core Core i9 processor, it's pretty much a no brainer between the two.
More interesting choices will be the 2.8GHz Core i7 860, at $284, and the Core i5 750, at $196. The i7 860 will still be slightly faster and a whole PC should end up slightly cheaper than the Core i7 920 build. I would still go for the LGA1366 based PC but the price premium must be taken into consideration by each buyer.
The Core i5 is a very good choice for cheaper systems and it's only a shame the lack of HyperThreading. Only 3D rendering and transcoding tools will probably miss it, games won't anytime soon.

Overclocking, as can be pictured in the first image, was good enough to achieve 4GHz and bench, which is decent enough. If you're planning on overclocking, the best processor still is the Core i7 920, as it will certainly be paired with a more mature motherboard BIOS and it's highly unlikely that the new LGA 1156 processors can substantially overclock more, given the similarities between the cores and the same 45nm process being used. The extra bandwidth available will also make the Core i7 920 shine, as it will be a major strength for two CPUs that will end up clocking about the same.