Intel Core i7 970 Boxed

Zitat: Pro: + Killer Performance + Great Overclocker + 6-Cores, Yay + Compatible With Existing Mobos Contra: - Still Very Pricey - 6-Core Resources Wasted With Some Workloads

Zitat: Pros: + Benchmark, knife, butter spring to mind + Slightly cheaper entry into Intel six-core club Cons: - £680 is an awful lot of money for a secondrung chip - Doesn´t overclock particularly well - Hard to justify when compared to 980X EE We looked at the Core i7 980X back in March this year and surmised that "the 3.33GHz-clocked Intel Core i7 980X Extreme Edition is, by a long, long way, the fastest desktop CPU ever released. It has wish-list status stamped all over it." Fast forward five months and those words still ring true. Intel clearly wants to keep its six-core consumer chips tagged with premium prices and the recent introduction of the also-hexa-core Core i7 970 does little to change that. Clocked in at 3.20GHz - 133MHz slower than 980X - the newest chip misses out on unlocked multiplier support and ships with a slightly slower QPI link. The pragmatic upshot is that it benchmarks at 95-plus per cent of its bigger brother and it rips through our benchmark suite at a rate that makes all other CPUs seem anaemic in comparison. The Intel Core i7 970´s retail price of £680 means that the only people who will really consider purchasing it are those who look upon the Core i7 980X EE with covetous eyes. So which is the better overall proposition? Based on a sample of one from each model, we reckon that it´s worth paying the extra £100 premium and going for the big-dog 980X EE. Why? Because it overclocks better and gives benchmarking aficionados - the kind of people who will drop £700 on a chip - an unlocked multiplier to play with. Core i7 970 makes entry into the exclusive Intel six-core, 12-thread club that little bit more palatable. As good as it is, and boy is it fast, we really wish Intel would launch a sub-3GHz model at £350. Sadly for us, Intel is under absolutely no pressure to do so this year. Much like most things in life, if you want the best you simply have to pay for it.