Chris, thank you for the editorial. I really appreciate the fact that you guys try your best to respond and answer our nit-picking comments and questions. Now based on what I have observed from your articles, I have some suggestions that might help (or might not at all). What if the bottleneck is related to the motherboard and its memory timing setup?
I did a quick comparison of your past setups for benchmarks (From this article, 2009-02-09 AMD AM3 article, 2009-01-07 Phenom II review article, 2008-11-03 i7 review article).
Basically, you used the same hardware for i7 920 in articles 2009-01-07 and 2008-11-03
Motherboard: Intel DX58SO Revision 403
Memory: A-DATA DDR3-1600 2X2GB set to DDR3-1333 CL 7-7-7-20
Video: MSI N280GTX-T2D1G-OC
Also just as an external reference I used Anandtech's setup from this article
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3512&p=3. For those of you who hate Anandtech I apologize, but this article had the most comparable hardware setup:
Motherboard: Intel DX58SO
Memory: Qimonda DDR3-1066 4x1GB (7-7-7-20)
Video card: eVGA GeForce GTX 280
In these articles Intel's i7 920 2.66 GHz performance seemed to be dare I say better than Phenom II (although in one article Phenom II did not exist, but just looking at raw numbers) specifically related to gaming benchmarks. The interesting point here is that they all used Intel DX58SO motherboard, using 7-7-7-20 timing for the memory. The number of modules varied; however, it didn't seem to make a huge difference from what I have read so far.
In the 2009-02-09 article and its subsequent editorial article Tom's Hardware used the following setup for i7.
Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme (X58/ICH10) LGA 1366
Memory: Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24 @1.65V 3x2GB (caveat here Tom's hardware did try overcloking in the editorial article so that does vary)
Video card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1 GB
Overall the video card chip model remained the same, the driver revisions were different but not siginifically; however Tom's used a different board and its memory setup was drastically different from its previous setups.
It would be interesting to see the differences in performance comparing these setups (some of these setups might not be possible due to hardware/BIOS limitations, I didn't have time to look into that part):
1. Rampage mobo with 8-8-8-24 memory timing vs Intel DX58SO with 8-8-8-24 memory timing
2. Rampage mobo with 7-7-7-20 memory timing vs Intel DX58S0 with 7-7-7-20 memory timing
3. Intel DX58SO with 8-8-8-24 memory timing vs Intel DX58SO with 7-7-7-20 memory timing
4. Rampage mobo with 8-8-8-24 memory timing vs Rampage mobo with 7-7-7-20 memory timing
Obviously I would use i7 920, the same video card and driver for above setups.
I highly doubt that the memory timing would cause such a performance difference. My bet is on the motherboard.
Also it would answer another question, or maybe obsfucate even more. Was it truly Nvidia's video card's fault that i7's potential was not translated into raw performance? or was it due to the motherboard, or due to memory setup? or both? or all three?
I'm not expecting another editorial article for this, but it would be good to see get this straightened out. I'm really hesitant to place the blame on Nvidia for this yet.