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1st Generation i7

M

mrgeppetto

n00b
Joined
Jul 6, 2015
Messages
12
Are the first generation i7's practically worthless now. I mean i have a 920 with a gtx580 and it seems to run everything pretty decent. I keep seeing them around the market for dirt cheap.
 
I'm sorry if I've offended you, this being the intel topic of the forum, I figured I would ask if first generation i7s were still worth using in builds for low-mid range gaming pc's
 
There are tons of them out there, real cheap, and they are some incredible bangs for the buck. Not so "worthless" I'd say, unless you are trying to sell some and had hoped to make a lot of money off them.

I'm still using my i7 930 five years later and it still does all I want, although I might upgrade in a year or two. I think I paid almost $300 for it originally and it looked like they were going for about $30 on E-Bay the last time I looked.
 
There very handy for updating x58 boards to xeon supported bios revisions....yea there still a great cpu its just so easy to do better for a hundred bucks or less. Its also the main reason they dropped in value
 
The i7s are largely useless at this point for a new build, as a proper X58 motherboard to run it will cost much more than the processor itself, not to mention the fact that a mid range Westmere Xeon will be far more potent on a performance basis and will likely overclock better as well. As has been mentioned, they are of use when updating old BIOSes to support a Westmere Xeon, which is about their only use, although a low end Gainestown Xeon (5500 series) that will do the same thing are pretty much being given away at this point.
 
First gen 4 core i7's @ 4GHz are similar to '8 core' FX @ 5GHz. They are superior in games and typical desktop apps and worse in some 'professional' uses (those which can utilize all threads) as tested here pclab.pl OC test. This is due to better IPC and worse performance of SMT vs CMT. Those i7's are also more energy efficient.

LGA1366 CPU's are dirty cheap but mobos are unreasonably high priced, probably due to 6-core Xeons being available there =)

LGA1156 platform price is also typically slightly higher that should be, all due to high cost of used mobos. But from time to time there are good deals and even nice P55 boards can be acquired quite cheaply.

Lately friend of mine needed mobo+cpu upgrade for GTA5 and we almost got him LGA1156+i5 because performance/price was unparalleled. We finally settled for LGA775 with LGA771 Xenon 3.16GHz because we swapped his AM2 mobo with Phenom X4 and DDR2 memory for G41 mobo with DDR3 memory I had in my work computer. LGA1156 build would probably cost him slightly less (including money from selling old parts) and have higher performance but that way we avoided hassle of buying and selling used parts which can be very very troublesome.

All in all LGA1156 is still very reasonable platform. Anyone with Clarkdale CPU can just slap cheap i5/i7 and enjoy performance similar to FX-8350 for fraction of money: http://pclab.pl/art50000-11.html. On LGA1156 even cheap mobos enabled overclocking. 4GHz might be out of reach due to weak power regulators on cheap mobos but 3.6GHz is very easy to hit even on worst mobos.

as for having i7 920 : either upgrade to 6core Xeon or sell mobo and buy something newer. It totally doesn't have any sense to keep LGA1366 and use 4 core i7 on it.
 
XoR said:
All in all LGA1156 is still very reasonable platform.
as for having i7 920 : either upgrade to 6core Xeon or sell mobo and buy something newer. It totally doesn't have any sense to keep LGA1366 and use 4 core i7 on it.
Click to expand...

I second that. The only reason I retired my P7P55D PRO + i7 870 @ 4GHz setup was the opportunity to score a manufacturer refurbished, completely spotless ASUS P6T Deluxe board for $100 which I didn't pass up. Also, running an i7 920 is not worth it since it draws a lot of power, heats up like a frying pan and is much slower that the X5600 series Xeons. :)
 
Yeah, only reason the lower end 1366 CPUs are dirt cheap is because of the abundance of 6-core 1366 Xeons that are available fro really cheap.

You can get a 6-core Xeon that will be able to overclock pretty much past the limits of motherboards for $60-$100.

Then there are the higher clocked 6-core Xeons which are stupidly priced unless you are putting them in a server.

3.06Ghz goes for $100-$120 while a 3.46Ghz goes for $220-$250 or higher.
 
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