Intel Core i5 750 

We were able to reach over 4.3GHz on the Core i7-870 by only increasing the base clock, which speaks volumes on how easy it has become to overclock right out of the box.

The chipset also supports 6 SATA 3 GB/s Ports with Intel Matrix Storage Technology providing RAID levels 0/1/5/10.

The rear IO panel has a pair of PS/2 ports for both the mouse and keyboard, a clear CMOS button, the optical and Coax digital sound output, eight USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit LAN, 1394 and ten channel surround sound.

Notice that the processor is only running at 1.2 GHz thanks to Intel's SpeedStep technology.

Benchmark Results: Looking at POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 25, the Intel Core series of processors dominated the top of the performance chart and is far ahead of the other processors.

The Intel Core i7-870 processor is priced at $555, which is more of a higher end sku if you ask us.

The Intel Lynnfield desktop processor lineup does bring some killer performance to the mainstream market, but only the Intel Core i7-860 and Core i5-750 processor are what I would consider mainstream.

In the first run, the benchmark only uses one CPU (or CPU core) to ascertain a reference value.

This is one of the reasons that the processors are so close, but that doesn't help the performance gap with any of the AMD processors.

So what is the difference between a Lynnfield Core i5 and Core i7 processor?

Under certain loads the processors will have the ability to scale up to some pretty high frequency, which is how it does so well against current Core i7-900 series processors.

It will be interesting to see what Intel decides to do with the Core i7-900 series in the months to come.

favourites. It's hardly a slouch when it comes to media encoding, either.

This is due to the fact that Intel has changed the integrated memory controller back to dual-channel, brought the PCI Express connectivity onto the processor, and improved their Turbo Mode functionality to offer varying levels of increased performance depending on the type of application being used.

Clearly the Intel Core i7 870 and Core i5 750 processors will have less memory than the LGA 1366 processors since they are just dual channel, but will that matter in real world tests and in the games?