Core i7 920 vs. Core 2 Quad Q9400 in Visual Studio?

[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!

 

[anosh]

Unfortunately I cannot help out with the answer because I went from
Pentium 820D 1GB 667Mhz DDR2
to
Core i7 920 (corsair xms3) 6GB 1600Mhz DDR3 P6T Deluxe

And it made a huge difference.
The hdd is the same 74GB Raptor.

The ram in actually running at 1066Mhz since I didn't overclock as I had planned due to the processor being fast enough in every aspect. Had I known it was going to be this fast I would have gotten 1066Mhz low latency memory and later upgraded to 1600Mhz when I would overclock.

I can also mention I'm running ATI 4850 and game at 1680x1050 and everything runs smooth on usually highest settings (ie COD4, Fallout3, COD5, C&C Generals).

Doesn't answer your question but I thought I'd pitch in since no one seems to have an answer for you..

 

[JS99]

4. The potential ability to load share between CPU & GPU once Windows 7 is released.

The upgrade might have been a bit premature, as the primary reason to buy an I7 processor won't be possible until Windows 7 is released. Windows 7 will allow load sharing between GPU (graphics card) and CPU. This will enable some really nice performance gains in games, or other graphic intensive applications like video editing software. Allegedly, games like Crysis will get a 20-30 percent performance increase. However, I heard that before when Windows stated that Vista would provide
significant performance gains for DirectX10 games, which has not proved to be the case.

Thanks for the response... I ended up going with a core i7 920 myself, since the overall cost difference wasn't much on a system that cost me close to $2500 anyways. This is the first time that I've heard of such impressive performance gains using Windows 7 however... has anyone run the Win 7 beta and can they confirm these type of performance increases? That would be great it it's true!