Comments (5)

Most people crying out loud about these memory timing and latency,but the truth is it does make substantial impact on performance.

Intel never thought AMD would raise form ashes and challenge them like this.Truth is AMD force Intel to launch a new product would compete with price and performance of Phenom II,this is where new i5 and i7 come in to play.This new Lynnfield got HT ,PCI-E controller in CPU and DDR 3 memory but game developers got better thing to than considering virtual cores,8x PCI lanse in dual GPU configerantion would halve the performnace and DDR3 doesn't make a substantial impact compare to DDR 2 on final performance.So still AMD and their Phenom CPU clearly win over intel.

Nice review as usual.
A bit confusing since HT actually cripple the performance here, but i believe the 750 would never beat the 860 if everything is the same (memory, timing, HT off, etc).

It shows that Lynnfield is a very nice choice for gaming

Yes, HT reduces the framerate in those games. It`s a bit different if the CPU has less physical cores like Core i3 (Clarkdale) according to my tests. So it`s not that HT is useless or even counterproductive in general, but propably overkill with four physical existing CPU cores. (Games are maybe optimized for quadcore CPUs, but not (logical) octacore CPUs...)

About the memory discussion: Don`t forget that Triple Channel itself leads to a bigger latency, but doesn`t raise up bandwith that much as most people might expect.

Check my Everest benchmarks for example I did with an i7-975 XE @ 3,875 MHz:

DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 2 x 2 GiByte (Dual Channel), UCLK 3,200 MHz: 16,646 MB/s, 40.6 ns latency
DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 3 x 2 GiByte (Triple Channel), UCLK 3,200 MHz: 17,437 MB/s bandwith, 48.0 ns latency

Increasing the Uncore clock (UCLK), which speeds up the part with the integrated memory controller and L3-Cache helps, too:
DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 3 x 2 GiByte (Triple Channel), UCLK 3,466 MHz: 18,193 MB/s bandwith, 47,2 ns latency