Intel Core i7 930 Review

Introduction

Intel have been churning out i7 920s for so long that their fabrication section have absolutely got the design and production process nailed. The original 920 C wasn't exactly bad, but it definitely suffered from a little too much heat and the overclocking abilities varied wildly depending upon the batch your processor came out of. Some barely cracked 3GHz while others found 4GHz to be a breeze.

Intel nearly fixed this with the release of the D0 stepping variant of the 920. This had much more consistent performance although some still did better than others. The main reason for the more reliable overclocking ability was the reduction in the heat output which was such a large part of the 920 C0/1 limitations.

Enter the 930. Still 45nm and, at a glance, the main difference is the increase from a base multiplier of 20 to a new base of 21. This has the naturally effect of increasing the base clock from 2.66GHz to 2.8GHz. So we get a little extra performance at stock but otherwise we can't really see the need for an entirely new model designation.

The move from the i7 920 to i7 930 is even more puzzling when we see it isn't 32nm, but also hasn't got the new AES instructions that enabled the 980x to demolish encryption tasks with ease.

So far, so uninteresting. Maybe like many hardware items there is something lurking within that doesn't show up in a pure specification list.