First Nehalem Machine Built

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Maximum PC was lucky enough to get the opportunity to head into a secret Intel lab which we can only guess was housed 20 floors below sea-level. In their feature, they attempt to build a rig using an unreleased Intel D58XSO motherboard and showcase the ease and potential snags of building a new system when the chips arrive.

They learned that the actual CPU is much bigger than the older LGA775 chips, and as a result, older heatsinks will not be compatible. Motherboard layouts will also be slightly revised, and some boards with six DIMM slots will be a tight fit for some builders. They reported that the move to tri-channel DDR3 didn't give a huge performance increase, but since this is a preview board, these findings will likely be slower compare to what we'll see when the new products are released to the public.

It’s the worst kept secret in the industry: Intel’s next-generation Penryn killer, codenamed Nehalem is just around the corner. We’ve been seeing leaked benchmarks based on early silicon for months, and Nehalem’s Wikipedia page is already packed with unconfirmed specifications. All indications – and this is with more optimizations to come, mind you – is that Nehalem may be a bad mother worthy of having Isaac Hayes pound out a theme song for it.

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Source: Maximum PC , Via: Engadget
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[Kougar]

There are also some interesting overclocking features that will introduce technologies that Intel has talked about previously but we agreed not to reveal yet. Let’s just say it’s pretty cool stuff.

Maybe this will finally get people to tone down the no overclocking FUD some less reputable sites thought it'd be great to cook up and speculate on.

 

[Kougar]

Well, now Hexus has joined the fray, but with some gaming benches to add to the mix. http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15015&page=1

Unfortunately Johan Gelas is correct on in the very least one thing, Nehlem is NOT about super improved integer performance. This directly means games are not going to see the huge boost that they did with Core 2.

A bigger concern is the memory though. Just look at that memory setup, CAS 7 on both the QX9770 and the 2.93GHz Nehalem. Being limited to 1066MHz is fine if you are at CAS 5 using DDR2, but it is realistically not any better than CAS 4 @ 800Mhz. So, 1066MHz at CAS 7?

By official specifications Nehalem will be limited to 1066MHz or 1333MHz, so again 1066MHz or 1333MHz with a CAS of 7? That's almost doubling the CAS latency from DDR2-800MHz... direct memory access with triple IMC's and QPI is not going to be enough to compensate fully for that, and I think Hexus's benchmarks show it.