Core i7 920 vs Q9400 in Visual Studio compiles?

[JS99]

Has anyone actually gone and done some benchmarks in Visual Studio for various processors? I can't seem to find any on the web no matter how much I search.

I am getting a new system soon, and will be getting either:

Core i7 920
6 GB DDR3 RAM
ASUS P6T X58 Motherboard

OR

Core2 Quad Q9400
8 GB DD2-8500
ASUS P5Q motherboard

I'll be overclocking to around 3.2-3.5 GHz in either case, not really interested in pushing the envelope too much beyond that. I just want to get the easiest overclocked performance I can without spending my life tweaking a bunch of settings and rebooting 100 times.

I'll probably be putting a Radeon 4850 X2 in there as well, as I intend to play most games at 1920 x 1200 as well... however, my main purpose for this system is work-related, where I'll be doing a lot of compiling in Visual Studio.

Is there any significant performance advantage to the i920 over the Q9400 in compiling .NET code, or is it more like the gaming scenario where current games are more limited by the GPU? All told the told system cost will be around $2500 CDN for the i920, or $2100 CDN for the Q9400, so it will be expensive either way... I'm just wondering if the extra 20% cost is something that I'll notice at all in performance for the next year or so. (Compile time is also constrained by the disk, so there's that factor to consider as well...)

Also, do you guys think that games might somehow be more optimized for core i7 in the next 12 months to allow for a larger performance delta between the Nehalem processors and the Core2 generation, or are we likely to see the current trend continuing where the results are not that different?

If there isn't much difference between these processors when both are clocked in the 3.5 GHz range for the two apps I mentioned (VS2008 and games), then there's really no point in me getting the i920. Thoughts?

Thanks a lot!

 

[zephyrprime]

There are probably no VS benchmarks but you should be able to get an idea of the performance gain by using benches of linux kernal compilations of which there are many.

 

[JS99]

Well, using that advice I did some searches and came up with this:

http://hardwarehome.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/

"With four cores and equipped with a 3.2 GHz CPU clocked at compiling a Linux kernel was 26 percent faster than the current top model from Intel - the Core 2 Extreme QX9770, also with 3.2 GHZ runs."

That seems to imply a 25% performance advantage in compilation clock for clock, at least on linux.

What about the gaming issue? Does anyone think we'll see i7-specific optimizations that will help out gaming performance to any significant degree over the next 12-18 months?

 

[JS99]

I also found this:

http://global.phoronix-test-su...&u=dax-3090-1044-24356

Unfortunately that guy's graphs seems a little screwed up, especially the first 2... can anyone figure out why he seems to show WORSE performance as i7 clockspeed increases? I figure it's got to be an error in what he's showing there, but I can't figure out what the real values are supposed to be...