Intel Core i7 965 Extreme


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Socket	1366
Number of cores	4
Clock rate	3.2 GHz
Cache	8 MB
Thermal Design Power	130 W
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Technology	45 nm
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Régis Jehl
Test date: December 11, 2008

The Core i7 Range

Intel unveiled its Core i7 900 were introduced in November 2008 with three models: this 920, the 940 and the 965 Extreme. All three are quad-core CPUs with Hyper-Threading technology allowing compatible software to simulate the presence of eight cores. Based on the Nehalem architecture, the i7 900 processors have an 8 MB cache and sit in a 1366 socket. Engineered at 45 nm, they have a very high Thermal Design Power of 130 W.

Just like the rest of Intel's Core i7 range, the 965 Extreme 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

When it comes to measuring this chip's performance, Intel has set a pretty high standard here. With applications that make little or no use of the multiple cores, it does as well as the Core 2 Duo E8600. Running our file compression test, for instance, took 1 minute 28 seconds on the i7 965 Extreme, just four seconds longer than on the E8600.

Of course, the real test of the i7 line is their performance as multiple-core processor running powerful software that supports their architecture. Here, the 965 really comes into its own, rendering the same 3D scene in 56 seconds that the Core 2 Quad Q9650 took 1 minute 15 seconds to finish.

To take another example, encoding a DivX video fell from 4 minutes 23 seconds on the Q9650 to just 2 minutes 51 seconds on the Core i7. With games, it'll depend to a large extent what you want to play, but everything we tried gave results way ahead of the Core 2 Duo E8600.

Compare the Intel Core i7 965 Extreme with the AMD Phenom X4 9750 and other CPUs in our Product Face-Off

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 330 W, which puts the Core i7 920 above the AMD Phenom X4 9750, which was already rather greedy.