Intel Lynnfield; Core i5 750 and Core i7 870 Evaluation

Test Systems and Comments

Our test systems are shown below:

Core i7 1366
Intel Core i7 920, 965 and 975
ASRock X58 Extreme (P130 BIOS)
6GB Kingston KHX12800D3T1K3/6GX
Zotac GeForce GTX 285 1GB
Kingston SSD Now M (Intel X25 SSD)
Cooler Master UCP 1100
Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler with extra fan
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (RTM)

Lynnfield (LGA 1156) Core i5 and Core i7
Intel Core i7 870, Intel Core i5 750
ASRock P55 Deluxe (P130 BIOS)
4GB Kingston KHX12800D3T1K3/6GX
Zotac GeForce GTX 285 1GB
Kingston SSD Now M (Intel X25 SSD)
Cooler Master UCP 1100
Intel Supplied Cooler
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (RTM)

AMD Phenom II X4 965
Asus M4A79T Deluxe
4GB Kingston KHX12800D3T1K3/6GX
Zotac GeForce GTX 285 1GB
Kingston SSD Now M (Intel X25 SSD)
Cooler Master UCP 1100
Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler with extra fan
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (RTM)

The test systems represent a range of Intel Core i7 CPUs from the low to the two top end CPUs. The AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE is a comparably priced CPU to the Core i5. This is to see if AMD can keep the claim that they have the best price performance option.

Overclocking:
When  AMD kicked out the Phenom IIs they hit a sweet spot for overclocking and tweaking. In some cases you could take a Phenom II and get a 1.5GHz+ OC without much effort at all. Intel on the other hand did not have the same type of luck with the Core i7. Yes you could get a pretty high OC but nowhere near what you could get with an AMD CPU. Well now Lynnfield is here and things have changed. With a very simple overclock we were able to get a 59% overclock. Using the simple overclocking tools in the ASRock P55 BIOS we were able to bump up the BClock to 202 and the Multiplier to 21. This gave us a 4231MHz Not bad at all temperatures were also more than acceptable. Bear in mind that this is overclocking using air cooling only, we did not had enough time to venture with more exotic cooling solutions such as liquid cooling or phase change.

Click to enlarge

The i7 870 was not as good on the simple air cooling I was using. For our 870 overclock we were able to reach 4029MHz. Temperatures were a little high but still well under the t-max for the CPU. When I attempted to push it further with the cooling I had I encountered stability problems. 

I am sure that with more time and testing it would be possible to reach much higher clocks and we plan on finding out what those upper limits are for both the Core i5 and the AMD Phenom II.

CPUz for the Core i7 870

CPUz for the Core i5 750