Q9550 vs i7 920

vjcsmoke

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Just looking at their thermal properties, the Q9550 is a 95W rated part and the i7 920 is a 130W rated part. Doesn't this meant that it would be easier to overclock a Q9550 to higher clock speed and at lower voltages than an i7 920? Which one overclocks better? Clock for clock, which processor would win?
 
it doesn't work like that, the core architecture is not the same, so not necessarily
 
So basically the only thing the Q9550 would win on is power consumption? It wouldn't run any cooler or overclock any faster?
 
the q9550 would definitely run cooler, that being said it doesnt necessarily make it a better overclocker. i have an i7 920 D0 and so does a friend and both our chips do 4+ ghz without much work i haven't seen many q9550 much higher than 4 ghz.
 
Just looking at their thermal properties, the Q9550 is a 95W rated part and the i7 920 is a 130W rated part. Doesn't this meant that it would be easier to overclock a Q9550 to higher clock speed and at lower voltages than an i7 920? Which one overclocks better? Clock for clock, which processor would win?

Typically the i7s are better overclockers.

Clock for Clock, no contest, i7 wins here. Granted , the application matters somewhat, but general computing, etc, again, no contest.

i7s generally run hotter, but as referenced by the responses here, that has little to do with their ability to overclock(taking the fact you'd get an aftermarket cooler into account)
 
I am interested in idle power. Anyone know the idle power of a barebone i7 system. I believe I measured a Q9650 system to be 47W to 55W with ASUS P5Q motherboard, Q9650 CPU, 4GB of DDR2, low end nVidia 7200 GS PCI-E video card, and a 300 GB velociraptor.
 
CPUs do not generally run at their TDP, they usually have groups of cpus with the same TDP. then it jumps up to another level. for instance the 920 has the same TDP as the 940 and 950, but if you measured the actual power used, of course it would be less.

but if you look at the 9550 you see it has the same TDP as some lower CPU such as 9450 and 9300.

if i had to guess i would say that at the same speed, the i7 might use just a little more (5-10w) because of the added transistors and hyperthreading
 
The i7's are more energy efficient. The TDP is higher because they are more powerful and faster, clock for clock, than the previous gen CPU's. The i7's will accomplish a typical CPU intensive task faster, thus using more energy per second, hence the high TDP. But the overall amount of energy used is less, and and i7 wins on overall power consumption.

It's not really fair comparing a current gen CPU with the previous gen.
 
yeah, you really cant compare the 2 since they come from different generations.

The new technology used in the i7's has win written all over it, so if you are going to take the plunge I would def go with i7.

I myself actually bought a q9550 a few weeks back, powered it up once and then decided to sell it and go i7. I've loved my decision and it was totally worth it.
 
^

That is why I'm going with the i7.

In addition, I look forward to upgrading in the future to the 6 cores. All I do that's demanding is video encoding so it's worth it :)
 
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