After three quarters on the market, Intel has refreshed its i7 lineup. While the i7 965 Extreme will fade out, it is being replaced by the i7 975 Extreme, which comes in the D0 stepping and clocks only 133MHz faster at 3.33GHz. The D0 stepping does not offer any advantages for the normal customers, only slight improvements.



As you can see, still 8MB L3 Cache, 4x 256kB L2 Cache and 4x 32kB L1 Data and Instruction Cache. We have disabled Turbo Mode and Hyperthreading to make benches more fair. Besides, XP SP3 is not really suited for mutli-core systems and the CPU does fail to load multi-threading applications on it's physical CPU cores, which can decrease performance. We will check this behaviour again when Windows 7 hits the market. Our screenshots represents therefor the benchmnark setup.




Testbed:
Motherboard:
Intel DX58SO "Smackover" (provided by Intel)
Intel X58/iCH10R

CPU:
Intel Core i7 920  (provided by Intel)
Intel Core i7 965XE  (provided by Intel)
Intel Core i7 975XE  (provided by Intel)

CPU-Cooler:
Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme 1366 (provided by Thermalright)

Memory:
Qimonda 3GB Kit PC3-8500U (provided by Qimonda)
Kingston 3GB Kit PC3-10600U KHX1600D3K3/2GX (provided by Kingston)

Graphics Card:
MSI R4850-2D1G-OC (provided by MSI)

Power supply:
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 500W (provided by PC Power & Cooling)

Hard disk:
Western Digital WD4000KD (provided by Ditech)

Case fans:
SilenX iXtrema Pro 14dB(A) (provided by PC-Cooling.at)

Case:
Cooler Master Stacker 831 Lite (provided by Cooler Master)