I7 870 vs 920 Overclocking Potential

[Guest]

I'm am designing a new rig, and it is to be built around the ATI 5870 gpu, I plan on overclocking every component to its maximum potential.http://img.tomshardware.com/forum/uk/icones/smilies/pfff.gif
Logically I head over to newegg to check out their prices on i7 920s, when suddenly I see this new addition from intel, the i7 860/870 which run at slightly higher stock speeds at around the same price, I think to myself, where's the catch?
I googled around, and I couldn't find much, anandtech was all for the lynnfeild chips, but couldn't even OC it past 4 Ghz (which I have done with my friends Nahelem 920)
That is unsatisfactory for me, I tend to perform cpu and gpu intensive tasks, gaming, rending video, working with 3d scenes in Maya and Max (learning DAZ studio's Bryce) My workflow involves quite a bit of rendering stills, my job is all about lighting and texturing, so to really see what's going on I have to render a frame, and then change something and render it again....
This is a very slow process because it involves waiting for up to 5 minutes for the section of the frame to render, and that's at low quality, so I only get a rough idea of what the final will look like, I would like to be able to render these snapshots in less than 30 seconds, some of the stream processing potential of the new gpu will help, but I can only utilise some of it because of renderer incompatibility... can't wait till V-Ray goes GPU friendly.
My current rig is crap, got an old E8400 O.C.'d to 3.8 Ghz stable (took me about 6 weeks to get all the voltages figured out, and a nice cooler...) paired with an 8800gt 4 gigs of ddr2 ram (x86 windows7) Renders are painstakingly slow and games have quite a bit of interface lag.
I've looked at the workstation solutions but they are outside by budget.
Basically I'm looking for info in the form of personal experience with the chip(s) or a link to some benchmarks (overclocked only, I don't care about stock speeds, my water cooling system stays with me for the next rig)
Anyways, this thread is open to any info directly relating to the Lynnfeild vs Nahelem topic.
(Yes, that means you have to save your drama for another thread, only I get to dramatise this page)

 

[one-shot]

I've gotten my i7 stable at 3.7GHz with HT off @ 195*18. I use 1.3Vcore, 1.35QPI and 1.91 Voltage for PLL. I can't leave HT on because the temps get too high. Maybe with your watercooling setup you could get much lower temperatures so your results will vary from mine. If CPU intensive tasks are your main priority, I'd leave HT on and try for lower clock speeds. I'm not sure on the overclocking potential of an i7 860, but all chips vary. My CPU is very finicky with voltage and others seem to have better luck on their CPU. If I were in your position, I would try to stretch out my budget and see if I can fit a dual CPU system into it.

 

[daship]

Stick with the x58 and the 920. The i9 will be x58 only so when your i7 feels weak and you want to upgrade if you already got x58 all you need is CPU, if you got the other rroute you will need CPU and motherboard.