NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better

Intel’s Core i5-655K & Core i7-875K: Overclocked and Analyzed

When it comes to Intel processors, the word “unlocked” is not synonymous with low-priced mainstream products - it’s a feature normally reserved for flagship ‘Extreme Edition’ CPUs that bear higher price tags. Things are set to change today because Intel is launching the “unlocked” K series of processors to fit into the existing Lynnfield and Clarkdale line-up:

Processor	Core (GHz)	Unlocked	Turbo Frequency (GHz)	Max Mem Clock	Cores / Threads	L3 Cache	TDP	Price
Intel Core i7-980X	3.33	Cores, DDR3, Power	Up to 3.60	3 Channels 1333MHz	6 / 12	12MB	130W	$999
Intel Core i7-870	2.93	DDR3, Power	Up to 3.60	2 Channels 1333MHz	4 / 8	8MB	95W	$562
Intel Core i7-875K	2.93	Cores, DDR3, Power	Up to 3.60	2 Channels 1333MHz	4 / 8	8MB	95W	$342
Intel Core i5-655K	3.20	Cores, DDR3, Power	Up to 3.46	2 Channels 1333MHz	2 / 4	4MB	73W	$216
Intel Core i5-650	3.20	DDR3	Up to 3.46	2 Channels 1333MHz	2 / 4	4MB	73W	$176
Intel Core i3-540	3.06	DDR3	N/A	2 Channels 1333MHz	2 / 4	4MB	73W	$133
Intel Core i3-530	2.93	DDR3	N/A	2 Channels 1333MHz	2 / 4	4MB	73W	$113

While it is interesting that Intel is offering unlocked core multipliers on Lynnfield and Clarkdale, it’s more interesting that the models being introduced are not the most expensive in their respective families. Especially considering that the i7-875K’s stock speeds are identical to the i7-870 while costing less. At $349, it's only a stone's throw away from AMD's 1090T, while you've got the i7-860 coming in cheaper than both. All of these processors can be compared to one another in Bench here and here.
Overclockers will sit up and take note at the prospects of increased flexibility and the potential of alleviating bottlenecks caused by insufficient bus margins on cheaper processors. We've all had CPUs that seem to have additonal headroom for frequency scaling, but are held back because the highest available core multiplier ratio is too low.  We increase reference clock freqeuncies, only to find that some of the related busses aren't completely stable and as a result no choice but to fall back or relax key performance registers which defeats the purpose of performance related overclocking. That's one of the areas where the K-series might help. Another key factor that makes unlocked processors attractive is that they open the doors to easy overclocking for users that like to keep things simple. With unlocked multipliers we can overclock the CPU without having to fiddle around with memory ratios or memory timings, leaving those settings static.

As there are no under-hood changes to the substrates themselves, there’s not a whole lot of benchmarking for us to do in this review. We’ve already compared the performance of similarly clocked non K-series Lynnfield and Clarkdale processors in our platform launch articles and also have a range of comaprisons in Anandtech Bench. Our focus in this write-up is to look at how the i5-655K and i7-875K fit from an overclocking perspective against both their cheaper and more expensive counterparts.
Be for-warned that this isn’t a typical launch piece; it’s full of talk about voltages and harps on about overclocking in a way that will send many readers to sleep. If that isn’t a big enough deterrent, then read on…

This Just In: G.Skill Giveaway Goodies

Before the new site launched I demoed a new feature I'd been toying with called This Just In. The idea is to give you guys a quick glance at what I'm working on (and eventually what the entire team is working on) as soon as something new arrives at our doorsteps.

I'll admit that there have been a few things that have arrived since my last post, however all of them are under NDA at this point. I do have good news though, more giveaways are coming.

I asked our ad reps to see if any of their clients wanted to provide any giveaways to commemorate the new site launch. G.Skill was eager to show their appreciation for you all and dropped off a big box of goodies to give away.

I haven't inventoried it all yet, nor have I decided how we're going to give it away but expect more details next week :) And congrats to our AMD/Lenovo giveaway winner Scott T. from Syracuse, NY. Scott and I have already been in communication and AMD is working hard to get him his brand new ThinkPad X100e asap!

Fastest Memory Race Heats Up - Corsair Announces 2533MHz DDR3

The whole 'fastest memory' halo product race is a bit of a farce.  In terms of DDR3, Corsair started the race back in 2007 with their first set of Dominator modules, running at 1600Mhz, 10-8-8-24.  This has been followed and bested, mainly by Corsair, but with sneak appearances by Kingston, G.Skill and Patriot (see below).

Available as single sticks from the Corsair website, these new GTX4 modules will set you back $325 for each 2GB stick.  With rather slack timings of 9-11-10-30 at 1.65V, each module is handtested using a Core i7 Lynnfield CPU on a Gigabyte P55 motherboard.  Michal Nowicki, Corsair's inhouse overclocker, advises that 'most CPUs will require sub-ambient cooling to run [these modules] at their maximum speed'.

Despite the lifetime warranty and the ability to boast about a 'halo' product, I can't see a point in these sticks - even for overclockers.  With such slack timings to begin with, I wonder just how much headroom is available, when other 2400+ kits with better timings are available.  At $325 a stick, you really are shooting yourself in the foot.

But alas, these modules will sell, and Corsair know they will.

A brief (and abridged) history on the latest and greatest memory is summarised below:

Date	Company	Brand	Speed	Timings
Jun '07	Corsair	Dominator	DDR3-1600Mhz	10-8-8-24
Jun '08	Corsair	Dominator	DDR3-2000Mhz	8-8-8-24
Dec '09	Corsair	Dominator GTX	DDR3-2250Mhz	8-8-8-24
Jan '10	Corsair	Dominator GTX1	DDR3-2333Mhz	9-11-9-27
Mar '10	Kingston	HyperX	DDR3-2400Mhz	9-11-9-25
Apr '10	G.Skill	Trident	DDR3-2500Mhz	9-11-9-28
Apr '10	Patriot	Viper II	DDR3-2500Mhz	9-11-9-27
May '10	Corsair	Dominator GTX4	DDR3-2533Mhz	9-11-10-30

Update: Mac OS X Portal Performance

It’s been a while since anyone treated Mac OS X as a first-tier gaming platform, so when Valve announcedthat they would be bringing their Steam service and the Source engine to the Mac, it was big news. After a roughly 2 month beta period for the Mac versions of Steam and the Source engine, yesterday Valve finally released the first wave of their Mac gaming efforts.

As it stands Valve is taking a gradual approach to rolling out their back catalog to the platform. Even though Steam is out and the Source engine has been ported, this week has seen the release of only 1 Source game for the Mac: 2007’s critically acclaimed Portal.

While it’s not the most graphically intensive Source game these days (that title belonging to Left 4 Dead), at this point it’s as good as anything else for looking at the performance of the Source engine under Mac OS X, particularly considering how long it’s been since a game’s original developer did the Mac port. So with that in mind, we went ahead and took a quick look at Portal’s performance under Mac OS X.

As is the case with all of the games on the Source engine, they’re designed to scale up and down fairly well. With modern hardware though, we’re hard-pressed to keep older Source games from achieving runaway frame rates. So Portal performance is somewhat arbitrary – most Macs with a discrete GPU should be able to handle it to an acceptable degree.

The Test

For our test we loaded up our GPU test rig with Mac OS X 10.6.3 in a Hackintosh configuration. As Mac OS X does not currently support either the GeForce GTX 400 series or the Radeon HD 5000 series, we had to step back a bit with our video card choice, settling for a GeForce GTX 285. And while the use of a Hackintosh does technically invalidate our results since it’s not a real Macintosh, based on our experiments we believe that our results don’t suffer in any way for using a Hackintosh, and as such we believe the results to be experimentally valid. But of course, your mileage may vary.

CPU:	Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz
Motherboard:	Intel DX58SO (Intel X58)
Chipset Drivers:	Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel)
Hard Disk:	OCZ Summit (120GB)
Memory:	Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20)
Video Cards:	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
Video Drivers:	NVIDIA ForceWare 197.13
OS:	Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Mac OS X 10.6.3 "Snow Leopard"

Image Quality

We’ll start quickly with a look at image quality. Valve is traditionally a staunch Microsoft ally, having built up their services and engines around Windows and DirectX. For the Mac OS X port of Source, Valve had to replace the DirectX backend of Source with Mac-appropriate components, the key of which is OpenGL. Such a change can impact image quality depending on how it’s done.

Gallery: Mac OS X Portal

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Portal - Windows. Click to enlarge

Portal - Mac OS X. Click to enlarge.

We have a gallery of screenshots, but for our analysis we’ll stick with comparing in a single set. Going with 2560x1600 with the game at its highest settings and 4xAA/16xAF, to our surprise the images are distinctly different when directly compared. The Mac screenshot is noticeably foggier than the Windows image, and textures appear to be less sharp. It’s not a night & day difference, but the Windows screenshot is distinctly clearer than the Mac screenshot. Without a Windows reference image it would be harder to tell that the Mac screenshot differs this much, but we believe that the difference is great enough that anyone with an eye for details that has ever played Portal on Windows would notice the foggier/blurrier IQ on the Mac.

Now some of this can be explained away due to gamma, since Mac OS X and Windows have different default gamma levels, but gamma could never explain the entire difference. There’s clearly a difference in IQ between the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Portal, and it’s not in the Mac’s favor. It’s by no means bad, but as one person put this when being shown these screenshots “It’s like looking at a magazine scan” when looking at the Mac.

Performance

The other half of our quick look is at performance. The Macintosh platform is renowned for being a graphical powerhouse, but this refers to professional/prosumer photography and the like. For gaming, Apple has been slow to include support for new hardware and new driver features (they are just now OpenGL 3.0 compliant) and overall their drivers are more conservative when it comes to performance. Portal is going to be slower, the question is by how much.

We went ahead and ran a timedemo from test chamber 18 and beyond on both the Mac OS X and Windows versions of Portal. We kept the settings cranked up at all times, but varied the resolution between 1280x800 and 2560x1600 to look at different GPU loads. At the worst-case of 2560, the Mac version of Portal runs at only 54% of the speed of the Windows version. That moves to 63% at 1920x1200, and 66% at 1280x800.

Portal – like all Source engine games – is CPU limited when given a powerful enough GPU, and even with just a GTX 285 we can approach that under Windows. Under Mac OS X however, we look to be GPU limited at all times. The framerate never suffers as we’re always averaging more than 60fps, but we can easily turn off MSAA and AF to improve performance if we needed to.

Closing Thoughts

For Source engine enthusaists hoping to see the Mac OS X port of the Source engine meet the high standards of the Windows version, Portal presents a mixed bag. In our limited testing the Mac version of Portal doesn’t significantly suffer for being a port, but at the same time it can’t quite match the image quality of the Windows version. Feature-for-feature there is parity, but the Mac version just isn’t as sharp as the Windows version.

Performance isn’t any better. Portal is an easy game to run and so we’re largely being academic here, but the “tax” for Mac OS X is roughly a generation in hardware performance. For the performance we’re seeing on a GTX 285 under Mac OS X the results are similar to what we’d see under Windows with something like a 9800GTX. Given that at the high-end the Mac platform is also a generation behind in hardware, and you’re looking at 2008 performance for Portal even with the best hardware you can get today for a Mac.

Ultimately having the Source engine ported to Mac OS X is going to remove the technical need to use Bootcamp to run Windows for games, but based on Portal it doesn’t remove the need to boot Windows for performance reasons. For long-time Mac users none of this should be surprising, but it means that we shouldn’t expect the Mac OS X version of the Source engine to be revolutionary.

Update: 5/15/2010

On Thursday after we published our article Valve pushed out an update for Portal that focused on fixes for the Mac version. The big fix was the following:

Fixed screen "fuzziness" caused by color correction operation

This fixed the blurriness issue we saw with the initial version of Portal. Texture and geometry quality is now as sharp as it is under Windows. Performance remains unchanged, while there is still an image quality difference between the two due to lighting differences and a general degree of fogginess that still appears on the Mac OS X version.

Gallery: Updated: Mac OS X Portal

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Portal - Windows. Click to enlarge

Portal - Mac OS X w/Patch. Click to enlarge.

Overclocked: Our Custom Radeon HD 5870 Roundup

Fans of custom video cards have undoubtedly found themselves a bit disappointed with the Radeon HD 5800 series. Due to a perfect storm of low GPU yields from TSMC and NVIDIA’s late arrival with the GTX 400 series, the first 6 months for the 5800 series was nothing other than bonkers. AMD was selling GPUs to their partners as fast as they could come out of TSMC, and their partners were selling finished boards to OEMs and-end users alike as fast as they could be assembled. Even at prices over MSRP, the 5800 series flew off the shelves, leaving AMD’s partners with little-to-no supply of GPUs to tinker with. Custom 5800 series cards effectively took a 6 month vacation.

That wait finally came to an end in the Spring of 2010, as an increase in GPU supplies allowed AMD’s partners to catch their breathes and focus on their custom cards. With 6 months under their belts AMD’s partners were able to come up with a variety of designs for their custom cards, and today we’re going to be looking at a trio of custom Radeon HD 5870s: Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870 Toxic 2GB, MSI’s Radeon HD 5870 Lightning, and Gigabyte’s Radeon HD 5870 Super Overclock.

	Sapphire 5870 Toxic 2GB	MSI 5870 Lightning	Gigabyte 5870 Super Overclock
Core Clock	925MHz	900MHz	950MHz
Memory Clock	1.225GHz (4.9GHz data rate) GDDR5	1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5	1.25GHz (5GHz data rate) GDDR5
Frame Buffer	2GB	1GB	1GB
Voltage Control	No	Yes (1.35v)	Yes (1.28v)
Price Point	$499	$479	$499

Custom cards are almost always interesting for a few different reasons. Often it’s a chance to see what AMD’s partners learned about a GPU over the preceding months and are trying their hand at producing something cheaper. Other times it’s throwing cost-efficiency out the window in the name of better components and coolers. And yet in other times it’s about producing a card that fills a specific niche, such as hardcore overclockers or users with cramped cases.

Today we’re looking at 3 such cards, each taking a different approach in their custom design. MSI’s Lightning is the overclocker and Sapphire’s Toxic is the build-it-better card, while Gigabyte’s Super Overclock attempts to straddle the line between the two by doing both at once. Ultimately however all 3 shoot for the same goal even if they go about it in different ways: maximizing performance.

Finally it shouldn’t come as a surprise that with all 3 cards designed to be superior 5870s that they command a superior price. At $480-$500, all 3 cards are solidly in the luxury category.