Time To Upgrade: Should You Dump Your 2007 PC?

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Intel agressively promotes its Core i3/i5/i7 series, but we wonder: Does it make sense to replace a three-year old high-end PC? In the end, quad-core processors were already pretty powerful in 2007. We created a brand new system and a 2007 PC to compare.

Test Setup

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System I
Motherboard (LGA 775) MSI P35 Platinum (Rev. 1.0), Chipset: Intel P35, BIOS: 1.C (30/12/2009)
CPU Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (65 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB L2 cache, TDP 130 W)
RAM 4 x 1 GB DDR2-800 (Corsair CM2C1024-6400C4 5-5-5-15)
Graphics Zotac GeForce 8800 GTS, GPU: G80 (570 MHz), Graphics Memory: 320 MB GDDR3 (900 MHz), Stream Processors: 96
Hard Drive Western Digital Raptor, 150 GB (WD1500ADFD), 10 000 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s, 16 MB cache
Power Supply PC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V 750 W
System II
Motherboard (LGA 1156) MSI P55A Fuzion (Rev. 1.0), Chipset: Intel P55, BIOS: 1.0 (07/12/2010)
CPU Intel Core i7-870 (45 nm, 2.93 GHz, 4 x 256 KB L2 and 8 MB L3 cache, TDP 95 W, Rev. B1)
RAM 2 x 2 GB DDR-1333 (OCZ3G2000LV4GK)
Graphics MSI R5870 Lightning TwinFrozr II, GPU: Cypress (900 MHz), Graphics RAM: 1024 MB GDDR5 (2400 MHz), Stream Processors: 1600
Hard Drive G.Skill Phoenix 100 GB SSD (FM-25S2S-100GBP1), SandForce SF-1200 controller, SATA 3Gb/s
Power Supply PC Power & Cooling, Silencer 750EPS12V 750 W
System Software & Drivers
Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate x64 fully updated on 07/29/2010 using Windows Update
Drivers and Settings
ATI Radeon Driver ATI Catalyst 10.7 for Windows 7
Nvidia Geforce Driver GeForce Driver Release 258.96
Intel Chipset Drivers Chipset Installation Utility Ver. 9.1.1.1025
Intel Storage Drivers Matrix Storage Drivers Ver. 8.​9.​0.​1023