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• Conclusion

  It’s a good time to be wealthy—no doubt about that. Gaming enthusiasts who can afford the highest-end graphics configurations available will likely want Intel’s $1,000 Core i7 965 Extreme not just for the quantifiable boost it does in fact lend to games, but also for the veritable kick in the pants it delivers in productivity and media-creation applications (for more on how Core i7 performs outside of gaming, check out our launch coverage from yesterday). With that said, gaming on Core i7 is hardly paradise—though Intel spared no expense importing the palm trees (an ultra-fast CPU), white sand beaches (familiar CrossFireX multi-card rendering support), and fruity umbrella drinks (Nvidia’s SLI technology, enabled on a palatable desktop platform for the first time—we’re not counting Skulltrail here). Now the impetus is on AMD and Nvidia to smooth out some of the rough edges we encountered in our testing. Repeated crashes, heat intense enough to require user-intervention, and bi-weekly driver drops are hardly hallmarks of a mature configuration ready for mass consumption. But if you’re a card-holding early adopter and patient enough to endure the lumps in Intel’s oatmeal, we have no doubt that X58 will be the platform to own when it comes to gaming. Cost aside, what other options are there? Nvidia’s 790i SLI only supports one multi-card technology, as does Intel’s X48. AMD has a great value in the 790FX, but as we saw in several benchmarks, the Phenom in its current state is simply unable to keep pace with the fastest graphics card arrangements selling right now, never mind how it stacks up against Intel’s processors. We’ve seen AMD’s roadmaps and know the 45 nm Deneb is on its way. However, we remain skeptical that a basic die shrink with additional L3 cache is going to close the gap established here with Core i7. What about our graphics contenders? We’ve been planning a "clash of the titans" story for a while now, intending to pit 1, 2, and 3-card SLI setups against 1, 2, and 4-card CrossFireX systems. This gaming comparison slowly morphed into that story—and it just so happened we had Core i7 and Far Cry 2 to add to the mix. While AMD’s Radeon HD 4870s perform fantastically in a number of our tests, the company has optimizations ahead of it yet. CrossFireX doesn’t always scale well, particularly where it’s needed the most—at 2560x1600. Understandably, there aren’t many gamers with 30" displays. However, we have to assume that anyone willing to buy a $1,000 CPU, $1,000 worth of graphics hardware, and a $300 motherboard wouldn’t have much trouble dropping another $1,300 on a super-sized LCD. We’re currently working with AMD to hash out some of the odd performance data we harvested, but until we have more information, we remain convinced that there is work to be done. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280s fare better, though primarily at 1920x1200. Upon switching to 2560x1600, the cards seem to choke up. Crysis, Supreme Commander, and Crysis: Warhead are all less than kind to Nvidia’s fastest boards. Nevertheless, the GeForce GTX 280 generally seems to be quicker on its toes—no doubt thanks largely to the latest GeForce 180 driver package, which is required to enable SLI on Intel X58 motherboards. The real winner here in this Core i7/SLI/CrossFire cage match is Intel’s X58 platform and the enthusiasts who now have a choice of multi-card rendering technologies as a result of Nvidia finally making SLI licensing available. Both graphics vendors still have work to do. But now, when favor flops from one manufacturer to the other, you’re able to drop in a pair of the fastest cards—and it won’t matter who makes them.

• Conclusion

  Since Core 2 Duo is currently dropping from the upper class into the mainstream, a reasonable platform seemed to be the best choice for this article. The MSI board we used comes with an overclocking switch, allowing users to easily set their bus speed from FSB1066 to FSB1333 or FSB1600. We used the BIOS settings and different speed increments to overclock a Core 2 Duo E8600 to as much as 4.26 GHz. The focus of this article is efficiency, hence it was more important to determine the best clock speed with a focus on performance per watt. The P45D3 Neo-F was helpful for this article idea because the three-phase voltage regulator is typically more efficient than the multi-phase circuits found on enthusiast motherboards. The downside is limited capabilities for overclocking a Socket LGA 775 quad-core to speeds of 4 GHz, due to possible power limitations. Still, users looking for quad-core power should probably wait for Intel’s P55 platform and Clarkdale processors, which are expected later this year. 3.9 GHz Wins! Although the 4.26 GHz setting provided the most performance, the 3.9 GHz overclock turns out to be the winner of this efficiency analysis. The clock speed increase provides a nice speed bump when compared to the 3.33 GHz stock speed without bumping power consumption up to excessive levels. If you are looking to get the best performance paired with the lowest effective power consumption, the fastest possible speed without a voltage increase should be your goal. We found it more impressive to see that the performance per watt during a PCMark Vantage run was better than the default Core 2 Duo E8600. This means that all overclocked settings provided better efficiency than the 3.33 GHz stock speed. Clearly, Intel’s Wolfdale core could be running at 3.66 or probably slightly faster speeds without being less efficient! Unfortunately, it is pretty safe to say that such speeds won’t be introduced—they don’t fit into Intel’s multi-core strategy anymore—although an E8700 model at 3.5 GHz might be coming soon.

• Motherboard: Quintessential Supermicro

  The C7X58 motherboard tied into the SuperWorkstation 5046A-XB is typical Supermicro fare. That is to say the board is somewhat plain to look at, yet meticulously laid out, passively cooled, and clearly designed with reliability in mind. Because Intel isn’t yet shipping the single-socket “Nehalem-WS” Xeon family, Supermicro’s first-generation workstation design must center on the X58 chipset and accommodate Core i7 processors. It’s worth noting here that Intel is expected to continue supporting the workstation market with X58 once Nehalem-WS emerges. However, that single-socket Xeon will support ECC memory, enhancing the platform’s reliability story beyond what either Intel or Supermicro can boast right now. Supermicro is claiming support for all Core i7 and upcoming Nehalem architecture-based processors, so we assume that this machine will include single-socket Xeon compatibility when the time comes. With that being said, we wouldn’t hesitate to use Core i7 today, even in a true workstation build. Like most enthusiast boards out there, the C7X58 comes armed with six DDR3 memory slots in a triple-channel arrangement. Official support caps out at 24 GB of DDR3-1600/1333/1066/800 using ECC or non-ECC modules. The X58 I/O hub offers 36 lanes of PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 connectivity and the ICH10 controller wields six lanes of PCIe 1.1. Supermicro uses the chipset’s available PCIe support to enable two 2.0 x16 slots (presumably for graphics cards) and one x8 slot (wired for x4 operation at 1.1 link speeds). There’s also a standard PCI slot, although it and the x8 PCIe connector would both be covered if you opted for two dual-slot graphics cards. This is undoubtedly a limitation for anyone who was also considering an add-in storage controller or a PCI-based sound card. The good news is that, even though Supermicro’s C7X58 is a workstation board, it does support both AMD’s CrossFireX and Nvidia’s SLI multi-card rendering technologies. Would this make an ideal platform for gaming? We think not—selling for $800 online, a gamer could easily find a motherboard/chassis/power supply combination for less that’d still be able to work with both technologies and likely boast more tuning knobs and switches. On the other hand, Nvidia has done a lot of work to its Quadro drivers, making SLI a more marketable feature in its workstation card lineup. SLI currently runs in one of three different user-selectable modes: SLI Frame Rendering, which teams two cards and presents a single adapter to the operating system, SLI Multi-View, which allows multiple displays to render 3D independently, and SLI FSAA, which sounds a lot like Frame Rendering to us with an emphasis on enhancing image quality through anti-aliasing (AA) rather than performance. It’s absolutely feasible that a professional might want to leverage Supermicro’s SLI license to take advantage of the feature. AMD, on the other hand, seems to have put very little into CrossFire support on its FirePro cards, neglecting to even mention it as a supported feature. The FirePro V8700 we put into our test bed here has the requisite connectors, but they remain unutilized. As a result, a professional workstation seems to be overkill for anyone looking to employ a pair of Radeons in CrossFire. As mentioned previously, the C7X58 centers wholly on Intel’s X58 and ICH10 chipset components, so you get six SATA 3 Gb/s ports with software-based RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10; a 7.1-channel Realtek audio codec, eight back-panel USB 2.0 ports (with two more internal), and a floppy controller. There is no legacy parallel ATA support, and Supermicro doesn’t add the third-party logic needed to resurrect it. The company does, however, add FireWire 400 and a pair of Intel 82574L Gigabit Ethernet controllers. Check prices for Supermicro's 5046A-XB