terrain safe:
How did you get 8GB memory? I thought DDR3 was in multiples of 3 or have they solved this now?
With the i7 the multiples of 3 is for optimum adressibility but is by no means a restriction. The i7 MMU (Memory Management Unit) has the capability to adress 3 Sims in a single clock cycle due to the width of the memory bus. Putting in an number of sims not divisible by 3 will force the MMU to revert back to writing to each individual one at a time - thus taking three times as long to write the same data. In day to day use this is negligable and would only be really noticeable should you really hammer the CPU in a memory bound operation - true life is that the CPU spends most of its time waiting for the HDD as it is the slowest component (measured in milliseconds rather than nano seconds for memory).
BladePilot:
Intel Core i7 920 (2.66Ghz 8MB Cache, 4.8GT/sec) 8GB 1067Mhz DDR3 Tri Channel memory 750GB Serial ATA (7200rpm) Hard Drive, 512MB ATI Radeon HD4850 Graphics card with Vista Ultimate 64bit as the OS.
I wouldn't attempt overclocking the i7 I want it to last a while rather than burn itself up prematurely besides with the new architecture you lose the FSB which was always the bottleneck for processing speed.
I'm looking forward to taking delivery of the new PC soon and will update this thread with my impressions of the system when I've had it running for a couple of days
Sounds like a nice system - not sure about the ATI card as am an NVIDIA man myself but I hear the 48xx are one good card.
About the overclock, the I7 is a new breed in that it can fully step on speed so when overclocked if the temprature starts to rise the processor will automatically shut down individual cores etc to manage its heat and longetivity. 4ghz is a pretty radical overclock but I mentioned that to just say what it was capable of. Keep a note of those forums as you may wish to clock it up a bit in the future which all X58 chipset motherboards (required for i7) can do nicely at the moment.
Even without an overclock the benchmarks for the i7 see a circa 25% improvement over an equivalent speed core 2 - so sould last a while anyways.
Enjoy - would be good to hear how it is as am thinking of building one myself soon.