My own little I7 920 review

[NetGuySC]

I just upgraded to the I7 920 with the Gigabyte ud3r board, 6 gig gskill 1600 ram and an asus 9500gt 512 DDR3 vid card.
(My old system was an AMD64 3000+ with K8vSe motherboard with 4 gigs of ram with a 6600GT 256 ram vid card.) I believe I kept the system pretty well optimized

To be honest, I think most my expectations exceeded even what this great chip is capable of achieving. I guess I expected everything to always be instantaneous, never any lag and never having to wait for anything. This is not the reality once I witnessed the I7, but it was close.

First I will state the less than flattering

- My wife did not notice a difference between the I7 and the AMD64 3000. Her daily computer experience entails 99% web browsing. messaging and little to no multitasking. This observance is understandable I guess, but I was really hoping she would notice a huge earth shattering difference. She did guess that it was a faster computer now, but to be honest on a amd64 3000, a low key web page does not open and load much slower than a low key web page on an I7 system. This explains my wife's complete lack of respect for the power of the I7

- I noticed a substantial difference in web browsing and navigating around the computer but perhaps not a $1000 worth of difference (hence my above reference to my high expectations, while waiting for the cpu to be delivered, that in all honesty could never be fulfilled.

- Perhaps it is my imagination, but Windows 7 64bit on an I7 seemed to almost meet my unrealistically high expectations of performance.

- (this isn't really a cpu reference but am mentioning it anyways) It also seems that the computer ran noticeably faster ( on both vista 64 and win7 64) when I just used the windows drivers for my motherboard and vid card (9500GT DDR3 512 ram), than when I used the drivers supplied on the driver disk.

Pros

- When using Nero Vision to encode / burn a video files to dvd on my AMD64 3000+ system, it would typically take between 3 and 5 hours for the process to complete. I usually would start it just before I went to bed and let it chug away all night. While my old computer was encoding it was useless for anything else.

On my I7 920 system, I have encoded / burnt two movies video files. From start to finish, one movie took almost 8 minutes to encode / burn and the 2nd movie took almost 10 minutes, while I was also browsing the system, web and looking at some music videos. I was absolutely amazed for this absolutely exceeded my expectations, for I hoping that a 5 hour process on my AMD 3000+ system would take about 45 to 90 minutes to complete on an I7.

I am looking forward to loading Photoshop CS on the I7 system for I dabbled with photo editing, I believe I will be amazed at the differences in performance with it also.

I think I am having to unlearn some of the last five years of using a computer with an old cpu. The I7 is truly great at multitasking, but my habit is to not multitask for I have never really been able to without a serious loss of performance on my old computer.

I am very happy I built this system and am looking on the net everyday to learn more about it and win 7. I all fairness I think at first I had a little bit of buyers remorse , but that is quickly dissipating

I think the real difference between this new system and the old system will be displayed to myself and especially my wife when I fire up the old computer and turn it into her computer and let the I7 be my computer. I bet then she will notice the differences


I give this a cpu a full six-pack rateing

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: NetGuySC
I think the real difference between this new system and the old system will be displayed to myself and especially my wife when I fire up the old computer and turn it into her computer and let the I7 be my computer. I bet then she will notice the differences

That's a good way for the I7 to turn into her computer. :laugh: Or, at least an upgrade to the old AMD 3000+.

It is like driving fast. Going 65MPH doesn't feel like much more than 55MPH, and 75MPH doesn't feel like that much more either. However, slow down from 75MPH to 55MPH and you will notice the difference.

 

[SonicIce]

good review. but i am doubting the 5 hour operation and the 8 minute operation are exactly the same task. i think the i7 would be around 6 or 7 times faster than a 3000+ in encoding work. not 30 times faster.

 

[vj8usa]

I'm guessing the stuff your wife does is held back more by your HD and internet connection than CPU. Maybe she'd notice the difference if you got a good SSD?

 

[NetGuySC]

Originally posted by: SonicIce
good review. but i am doubting the 5 hour operation and the 8 minute operation are exactly the same task. i think the i7 would be around 6 or 7 times faster than a 3000+ in encoding work. not 30 times faster.

I agree but I burnt another movie yesterday, it took 8 mins and change. I do not remember any movie taking less than 3 hours to encode on my old machine but I could be wrong.

I will encode the same movie on both machines, record the time and report it here. You have me curious as to exactly what the difference is.

 

[totalcommand]

Great review.

I'm in the same boat sort of, upgrading from a A64 3000+, nForce4 motherboard, and radeon x600xt to i7 920, X58 ud4p, and radeon 4890. Good to know this is a worthwhile upgrade!

 

[RayH]

I just did a similar upgrade from an Opteron 165, nForce4 motherboard to an I7 920 D0 stepping, UD4P. I was at the point where the old motherboard was bottlenecking my raid speeds.

Still testing the overclocking but I have to say the most noticeable difference was from also adding a 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD as a boot/OS drive. Even with some of the SSD issues currently being ironed out by the manufacturers, performance, especially seek times, just blows away normal hard drives. Opening Firefox with 30+ saved tabs takes less than 2 seconds and all applications just seem to respond quicker to user inputs.

SSD's are pricey in terms of storage but measured in real world performance improvement they may make a larger difference than a similarly priced processor upgrade for anyone that does not spend most of their time hitting 100% cpu utilization.

 

[NetGuySC]

Looks like I am never going to be able to do actual time comparison between the two computers.

But this is the latest of what I have found out and it looks like SonicIce was right.

On the amd 64 3000 I was running the latest nero and it would take 3-5 hours to encode and burn a movie, then on the I7 I loaded nero 7 and it would encode and burn a movie in about 8 minutes. I removed the nero 7 from my I7 and loaded the latest nero and it now takes about 30 and 40 minutes to encode a movie.

I am not sure why nero 7 encodes so much quicker, like 4 x quicker, but it does at least on my system.

Hope this helps someone that is curious about the differences between an I7 and a much lower grade cpu

 

[Sylvanas]

Opening and closing apps is not really dependent on the CPU and there will be no difference. To see instantaneous responses from Windows / Applications you'll need an SSD in place of a mechanical hard drive. Good to hear your review.

 

[Pokeylicious]

I don't know exactly what kind of encoding or burning you're doing with your i7 rig, but on mine, I can transcode a 2 hour movie on high quality settings with 2 passes using the current version of Handbrake 0.94, and I can complete it in a little over an hour. On my previous P4 (a 1.8GHz Northwood), I was completing the same encode in about 30 hours.

To say I was impressed was something of an understatement.