In short, the i7 970 is the 980x's little brother...and it tries hard to emulate the 980x's traits.
Where it does well is performance per watt; if your workload involves heavy usage of multi-threaded application, this processor is a god send.
Compared to my i7 920 @ 4GHz, this processor was at minimum 40% faster in rendering, encoding, and compression tasks.
In games I did not notice an appreciable gain.
I was able to overclock this CPU to 4GHz and my temps peak around 78-84 degrees C using a Prolimatech Megahalems.
The one flaw in the 970's emulation of the 980 is with regards to pricing; the 980x is $100 more, and having the unlocked multiplier makes that a better value.
All in all, this is a great product...six blazing fast cores! Intel Core i7-970 Processor 3.20 GHz 12 MB Cache Socket LGA1366
I upgraded from a 930 because I needed more speed and cores for video rendering. The improvement is very noticable. I did the research and the socket 2011 coming will have quad channel RAM, but so far that is about it. I figured instead of upgrading my motherboard, RAM and CPU just because Intel is trying to sell more of all types of product, I should just get this and this should be good to go for a good while.
I overclocked this to match the 980X's specs. That is all that you have to do. I paid about half the price on an auction site and I am pleased with that. I have not tested for games, but I imgaine that it is serious. Everything is much faster than the 930 which was fast by itself. With HT on, it is very smooth. I just wish that I could turn the Turbo Boost off. I have a Gigabyte board and it will not turn off. Great chip.
I've been building computers (as a hobby) for the last 15 years and must say I was amazed how much faster my i7 950 was over my AMD 1090T.
However, I'm really amazed by the overall performance boost when I purchased the i7 970 6-core (12 if you include the logical cores) processor. Even in non-multi-threaded applications, there seems to be an overall boost to system performance and also stability.
I do a lot of compressing and encryption. Watching a 2GB file become encrypted and compressed in WinZip in mere seconds is pretty impressive.
It does come with a fairly good heatsink and I'm not rushing to buy another one. I'm not a hardcore overclocked and so far, this processor has all the speed I need. Using Arctic Silver 5 and the stock heatsink, the temperature never goes above ~45-47C when using something that maxes the CPU out for an extended period (i.e. Handbrake. With SpeedStep turned on in "balanced" mode it idles in the upper 20'sC (~27-29C)
Unlike what other people and benchmarks say, even gaming (i.e. Crysis) seems to have a noticeable improvement in both game stability and startup time. Using Arctic Silver 5 and the stock heatsink, the temperature never goes above ~45-47C when using something that maxes the CPU out for an extended period (i.e. Handbrake).
Now, on the other hand, is it worth $500? Well, it all depends on how much you use your computer. Plus, I sold my i7 950 on a major auction site for ~$230 and my Corsair A70 for ~$30. So for me, the extra $300 is worth it. The performance is that impressive; however, it is still in the "luxury" category for me.
If you're an engineer or graphic artist and need the performance for your work, I would say it's well worth it (if you have a multi-threaded app.).
Moving from an AMD2000+ processor to an Intel Core i7-970 is like moving form a bicycle to a Space Shuttle - OMG is it powerful! I've been running it for about a month now and haven't had a single processor centric issue. I installed a Corsair Hydro Series H70 High Performance CPU Cooler and the chip runs at approximately 80 degrees Farenheit. I've managed to task all 6 cores using Photoshop but not anywhere 50%.
I rated it mediocre for the fact that it costs the price of most peoples' whole computer, and actually costs less to make than the cheaper i7's but intel is cashing in on the fact that it is 6 core and 12mb cache. AMD sells their six core at a fraction of the price. I did not notice any improvement, in fact, I get a lot more slowness and freezing than with the previous quad core I had. And it doesn't perform better in games. Also, any place that this cpu actually excels will probably never be seen. Unless you're buying it for bragging rights, you are really wasting your money. - Cpu Processors - Core I7 - I7 - Cpu'
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