Noise Reduction
Note that this is not a good test of Noise Ninja performance versus Noiseware. We used the default settings for both, but those settings may differ. If you really wanted to benchmark those two apps against each other, you’d have to take great care to ensure to use settings that created similar results.
Noise reduction apps don't seem to be heavily hreaded
In both cases, the noise reduction seems to simply scale with clock frequency.
Final Thoughts
If you look at the other reviews on the web, it seems that Intel has a winner in Lynnfield. Sure, it’s not as fast as the triple channel, LGA 1366 CPUs, but the overall cost of a Lynnfield system should be much less. We’ve already got an Asus motherboard in, the P7D55 Pro, a midrange board that’s priced at around $188. Another very interesting board is Gigabyte’s GA-P55M-UD4, a Micro ATX board with some cool features, like dual PCI Express x16 slots and a PCI Express x4 slot – and it’s priced around $149.
So you’ll be able to build a Lynnfield system for substantially less than an X58 system. Judging from the reviews so far, it will be readily overclockable. Lynnfield Mainstream CPUs built on Nehalem is certainly a winner for users as well as Intel.
In subsequent articles, I’ll be taking a closer look at P55 motherboards, gaming performance and system builds. It will be interesting to see how Intel’s new baby performs in the real world.
Loading tweets...
5 comments
Jeff
September 8, 2009 at 10:47 am (UTC -7)
Loyd, I think you meant to say “12 or 24GB”, not “12 or 24MB” at the bottom of page 1.
Loyd Case
September 8, 2009 at 12:43 pm (UTC -7)
Fixed, thanks. MB/GB/TB and MHz/GHz seem to be my eternal bane when it comes to typos. You see, I was *thinking* GB, but I typed MB anyway. My fingers are still living back a decade or so.
Derek
September 8, 2009 at 7:56 pm (UTC -7)
The gaming tests will be interesting, especially if you can compare a dual-PCI to a single in otherwise identical box. IIRC Lynnfield moves the PCI express from the north bridge to the chip, but only a single 16x lane. Dual-GPU’s are supported, but split the x16 into 2×8.
Looks like I may ‘need’ to replace my E8400 with an i7 860 soon. For my purposes the I9 is probably not worth waiting for. Do I really need 6 cores plus HT?
Dick
September 18, 2009 at 8:09 pm (UTC -7)
I’m waiting for your report on the Gigabyte P55-UD6 motherboard. I’m planning on building a new system after Windows 7 comes out – no sense in building it with Vista and having to do it again in a month or three.
Anyway, one review of this board (http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/09/17/gigabyte_p55ud6_motherboard_review/6) notes something very weird about this board regarding its memory configuration:
“The GA-P55-UD6 has a total of six DDR3 DIMM slots. The white slots are the first bank and are color coded to signify dual channel mode as normal. These slots will accept double or single sided modules. The blue slots on the other hand are another matter. When using only two of these (4 DIMMs total), double or single side modules may be used. When populating all six DIMM slots, the blue DIMM slots are only capable of accepting single sided memory modules. Just about any module you’d probably find yourself using on this board will most likely be double sided and thus, these extra slots are of very limited usefulness.”
One of the problems with this is that certain configurations are impossible because of the requirement for single sided memory sticks for the blue slots. This is very strange.
I’ll be more than interested in your findings about this limitation.
It’s great to see you again on internet TV. Caught you on Revision3 today!
Loyd Case
September 18, 2009 at 10:38 pm (UTC -7)
Actually, Kyle’s review is spot on. It’s really best to treat the UD6 as a four-DIMM board. It’s still a very good motherboard in most other respects.