Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 Processor Review

Testing – Real World
The longer I test hardware, the more I have become interested in real world benchmarking. Artificial benchmarks have their place, but I think it is very relevant to compare with things you actually do with a rig. I chose two real world tests, encrypting a DVD and testing in PhotoShop.

For encrypting and burning a DVD, I took a video that I had taken myself, which was 1hr 9min, and 1.25GB in size. I used Windows Movie Maker and Windows DVD maker.

dvd

The i7 shaved a few seconds shy of 12 minutes off the process. Need I say more?

Next I did some testing in PhotoShop. I used the PhotoShop Bench V3 by Driverheaven.net. The benchmark takes a .jpg and performs various filters on it in PS. Results are in seconds, lower times are better of course.

photoshop

Actually, there are 15 steps in the benchmark. For brevity, I listed only a few, many of them take only a couple of seconds. The i7 won in every step save one, where the two processors tied. Once again, there are some significant numbers here.

And again the overclocked numbers are just incredible.

Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 Processor Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 Processor