All About the Intel Core i7-980X Extreme

Both the Athlon II AX4 635 and the Core i3-530 are spawned from AMD and Intel. Athlon has been trying to give Intel a run for their money for some time now but Intel seems to still be kicking butt at the top of their game.

This latest Intel piece has been named the Gulf town by its developers. For the sake of this review, that’s what we will refer to it as. It can put up with a lot, including 123 threads all processing at once and six cores. They are always ahead of the rest in adding extra cores. If you are using a system that is using more than one core, that’s when this kicks in at full speed beating out its competition, such as the Core i7-975. If you don’t need this much brain power and aren’t using it for professional and advanced purposes, it may not be worth the staggering high price for you. 

If you have the i7-975, then you may want to think about upgrading to the Gulf town if you usually need a lot of working speed and data saved for things like large media files and 3 dimensional work. Don’t install this unless you BIOS your Motherboard, first or else you’ll have an unhappy surprise of it not working.  All laying on what type of app you are running or what you are trying to do, if you have multiple cores running, this system will run almost 40% quicker than the previous model did. That is not only impressive but great for time management for us workers who need it. It’s not going to make any difference in the speed area if you’re just using a solo core, like the ones you use for iTunes and such.

Both the 980X and 975 have a couple things in common that you may not know about. They both are Motherboard 1366 compatible. Similar in their thread running per core as well. They both have to processing threads for each core which adds up to 12 in all while the 975 version only had 8 threads processing simultaneously.  As we know there were two more cores added to the Gulf town model as opposed to the 4 that were running before. The Turbo Boost which they both incorporate are good for multiple cores with some cores not running, this will increase speed by getting rid of those cores.  It’s all about speed, speed and more speed with Intel’s line.

This extreme version was the winner in all areas pertaining to speed when it came into competition with the i7-975. Despite its speed areas with the help of multiple cores, the 980X came head to head in all the other tests against the 975. Dead last came the Phenom II X4 965 by AMD, which came as no surprise to me. You have to acknowledge the fact that even though the Phenom didn’t compare in speed to the other two if Intel’s pieces, it’s much, much cheaper at around $200 USD.

We wanted to work these processors to the bone so we put them through the Sony Vegas 8 Test. Between the three devices; they all came in close call with one another with about a minute and a few seconds of difference. . Another taxing and rough around the edges test we wanted to put the three of these through was the Cinebench Testing. On a points scale they were separated by an estimated 10,000 points between systems with the same sequence of winners as before. Oh, the powers of the 980X. I love it.

The best running test we did on the Gulf town was the Media Encoder test in which is passed with flying colors Not surprisingly, the 980X took first in this race and the AMD came through in second for a little bit of a switch and the 975 came in dead late a few second behind the Phenom. In all areas the 980X picks up where the other ones left off and could come in super handy for those of us who could use it. .

Now, let’s switch from multiple cores, to a solo core like iTunes. There was very little to no difference and this shows how much you’re not going to need something like this unless it’s multiples that you are working with. All three of them competitively only came within seconds of each other. Minutes of change I can do, seconds are a bit trivial to me.

The i7-980 come out on top everywhere else we put it to the test. We really were working at seeing how it worked with multiples as that’s where most of its power lies. So if you sit at your desk and whine about how slow everything seems to be going with all these other chips, you should be dropping the money for this. Otherwise, you shouldn’t feel compelled to.

If you’re into playing games on your OC, this is also good for those brainiacs that want to handle more processing speeds.  But you have to be a serious gamer or else you won’t get anything out of it. You’ll find that a lot of people will smirk and probably be pretty jealous of your setup if you go for the 980X, but you’ll actually have better graphics but just popping more graphics cards onto your computer.

Overall, you have one mighty piece of machinery if you go for the i7-980X by Intel, just hope you have enough stuff you can use it on. Don’t forget how much people will be impressed by your setup if you have to have the biggest and the badest out there on the market today.

Specifications

The Socket Type: The Intel LGA1366
Number of Cores it has: Six Cores total
The Frequency at Which it Operates: 3.3GHz
The Front-Side Bus: Has an Intel Quick Path Interconnect
Cache Storage Memory: 12 Total  Megabytes

The Upside

Offers more product than some of the other EE CPU multiple core chips and at the same price.

The Downside

The price is still pretty up there and uses the same usual speed with apps that are only compatible with one core.

Review

If it is used with the appropriate networks, then you’re looking at a much quicker speed than those of its competitors. It also doesn’t change speed if you are using a one core app.