Intel’s latest and most powerful processor has been popping up in the news over the past few months, but now it has been finally released and reviewed. The Intel Core i7-908X is Intel’s first six-core desktop processor released into their Nehalem line-up. Codenamed “Gulftown“, the i7-980X is built on the same 32nm process as the Arrandale/Clarkdale desktop CPUs and fits nicely into LGA 1366 motherboards powered by the X58 chipset with a simple BIOS update.
The 6-core beast comes with 1.17 billion transistors but thanks to the 32nm process is smaller than all the previous quad-core Nehalems. It comes loaded at 3.33GHz with a 3.60 GHz Turbo Boost, 12MB of L3 cache, 6 cores and 12 threads and a 130W TDP – the same as the other Bloomfield i7s. The chip also comes in the package with a new tower cooler that is bigger and presumably better than the cooler that came with previous i7s.
The Intel Core i7-980X performs well, very well actually. In tests that utilised less than four cores, the Core i7-980X was on-par with the Core i7-975 and was sometimes beaten by the Lynnfield Core i7-870 while gaming. However, when the six-core of the 980X were actually in use, it stripped past all the competition, offering between a 35 to 50% performance increase over the i7-975 while using the same amount of power. Impressive!
If budget is not a constraint then the new Gulftown Intel Core i7-980X is the best you can get. It strips past the older Bloomfield Core i7-975 which is priced at exactly the same and uses roughly the same amount of power – and it can be put in any X58 motherboard so long as you update the BIOS. The Core i7-980X will be hitting the stores soon for US$999.
