Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8GHz (190MHz x 20)

Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P (Supplied by Noctua)

Motherboard(s): GIGABYTE EX58-UD5 (Supplied by GIGABYTE)

Memory: 3 X 2GB OCZ Technology PC-12800 DDR-3 8-8-8-24 (OCZ3G1600LV6GK)

Hard Disk(s): Western Digital 300GB Velicorapter (Supplied by Western Digital)

Operating System: Windows Vista SP1 64-Bit

Drivers: Catalyst 8.11

Graphics card power comes today in the form of the HD 4870 X2. We test the i7 920 in single core to quad core configurations at 1680 x 1050, 1920 x 1200 and 2560 x 1600.

Hyper threading was enabled at all times and the CPU remained at 3.8GHz in all tests. Let's check out Vantage before we get into some real world games to see just what disabling the cores does for performance.

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/

Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

It's clear that Vantage takes full advantage of the extra cores, but the best gains are seen in the performance setting. We can also see the difference between three cores and four cores being quite minimal when compared to some of the other setups.