Intel 980x Gulftown
3D & Gaming Benchmarks
Published: 12th March 2010 | Source: Intel | Price: £850 - estimated |
3D and Gaming Benchmarks
3D Mark Vantage
The ever popular 3D Mark Vantage is very dependant upon the GPU and so shouldn't show much gain, although the available CPU power should ensure that the Physx result doesn't get hindered too much by our ATI card. As you can see the immense gain in CPU score only results in a 2000 point increase in the P-Score. However a 20000 P-Score from a single 5870 is mightily impressive.
Need for Speed Shift
EA's Need For Speed Shift is a curious game that began with some performance issues with a ATI cards that are still not greatly resolved on 4 series cards. But if our testing today proved anything it's that it simply adores brute horsepower, something the i7 980x has in spades. The overclocked 980 giving very nearly twice the framerate across the board that we obtained with the 965. We're beginning to run out of superlatives for this processor, so it's lucky that we only have one test left.
Crysis Warhead
Ah Crysis Warhead. For ages it's been the game that no hardware could tame. To paraphrase Commando, it eats CPUs for breakfast. Finally though we have a CPU that can give a single card solution an average framerate of over the magic 60 mark. Truly outstanding. With a minimum framerate in its overclocked state that many CPUs would like to see as an average, the i7 980 truly bludgeons Crysis Warhead into a pulp.
Let's move on to easily the least surprising conclusion ever.
Most Recent Comments
Blimey that's a bit of kit. Dear Santa
So wish I could afford to splurge on one of these, I wouldn't have to upgrade for tiiiiime.
Maybe with some ATI 5870's in crossfire, or Nvidia equivalents we could see 80 frames + from crysis
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Originally Posted by name='BloomerzUK'
OT: Love the avatar Tom.
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No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world.
Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department.
still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol
Great review btw.
Out of interest, did you manage to get a Super PI 1m at all? I just want to see some pwnage
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Originally Posted by name='alexhull24'
Some serious power, I enjoyed the review tom. Cost is the problem here though, but this is always the case with bleeding edge hardware. Most of us have to wait for it to trickle down into our price range, which doesn't usually take long.
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Originally Posted by name='mayhem'
£850 est. come on guyes thats raly taking the piss.
No way will it be worth it buying it. and there is no way on earth any one here is going to need that much power except for good scores on test benches and braging rights wich means naff all in real world. Thats like getting a car to compenswte for the fact you cannot be good in another department. still good good review though but way out of my budget range and some thing ill never own unless OC3d are gving it away as a ""PRIZE"" hint hint ....lol |
6x cpus are allowing those at the top end of benchmarking to exploit their donations at this point. We've already seen this week Shamino cream the 3dMark Vantage record by some 5000 points with a single 'retail' GTX480 in one run, but my argument would be that with a 4x cpu, or his 6x with a 5870, would it only be a few thousand.
It's going to take a long time, imo, for these Intel offerings to calm down on the pricing stake. Maybe it'll take a really good AMD 8x to do it, but as far as extreme top-end cpus go for pricing, I can remember my QX9650 being priced at less than half of this.
If ur thinking 980x will remain the top cpu for these sockets forever, then u can appreciate it being £1k - but I somehow doubt that with Intel sticking with this socket set for a good few years to come, that the 980x will be the top end for it's duration.
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