Just like the rest of Intel's Core i7 range, the 920 has a few extra features compared to the earlier Core 2 Quad Q9.

First of all, the memory controller is built into the processor rather than sitting on the motherboard, meaning Intel can make the most of DDR3 RAM.  This means that you can put up to three RAM chips on your motherboard to benefit from a whole lot of bandwidth.

Hyper threading, one of our favorite features in the old Pentium 4 series, is also back.  Put simply, this allows you to simulate an extra process running on each core of the processor, meaning your operating system will treat a quad-core processor as if it had eight cores, allowing for finer control of the processor's performance

Although the 920 is the slowest of the i7 range, It does very well indeed and is well ahead of the Core 2 Quad Q9650.

Rendering our 3D test scene took just 1 minute 6 seconds on the i7 920, something that our Q9650 took 1 minute 15 seconds to do.

Another clear example was our file compression test, which took just 2 minutes, in place of 2 minutes 30 seconds.

Compared to the next model up, the Core i7 940, the Core i7 920 can get within 15% of its superior.  In Photoshop CS3, for instance, applying the same series of filters took 2 minutes 11 seconds on the 920 against 1 minute 53 seconds on the 940.

Let's finish by looking at energy use.  While idle, it was clear that Intel has put some thought into reconfiguring the power requirements of the Core i7 series by 160 W--almost as little as the Core 2 Duo E7300 with just two cores.

This low consumption is mostly down to the new 'uncore' system that Intel has developed, which cuts power to any of the cores not currently in use.

When the processor has more work to do, though, more cores are activated, leading to a peak power consumption on our test PC of 314 W, which puts the Core i7 920 above the AMD Phenom X4 9750, which was already rather greedy.