Intel Core i7 "Nehalem" 920, 940 & 965 XE Processor Review

The Platform in Pictures

Stock Cooler

Need a reading break? Well enjoy this picture gallery which provides an up-close look at the various non-processor components that Intel will be launching with this new platform.

With a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 130W, the Core i7 series has the potential to be a hot little chip, but Intel have bundled a good-sized copper-core cooler to cope with the heat output. As you can see, it is huge compared to the relatively dinky cooler that was included with cool-running 45nm Core 2 Duo's.

Intel DX58SO Motherboard

The Smiling Skull... Scaring people into buying Intel products since '07 and is the basis for Intel's performance motherboards for the last few years.


Along the three Core i7 models, Intel will also soon be launching the DX58SO 'Smackover' motherboard, which has served as our test platform, and which has proven itself to be solid foundation on which to launch a new product line.


As with all their enthusiast-oriented motherboards, Intel's Smackover features a simple black, blue, and white theme. As you can see the Skull logo has a predominant place on the X58 IOH Hub heatsink. While the aluminum heatsink may look plain, it performs well and has a truly excellent mounting system.


As has become the industry norm, Intel have used long-lasting solid state capacitors throughout the motherboard. The Smackover features a well-spaced six-phase power design, with mighty-looking PA2080 power inductors from Pulse Engineering. All the MOSFETs are covered by their own heatsinks and have thermal material applied to them. The socket area is little crowded, and installing low and wide CPU coolers can be a little tricky but some of the larger ones like the Thermalright Ultra Extreme (with the optional i7 mounting kit) installed without a problem during our testing.


Here we have the brand new LGA1366 socket with its 1366 contact points. We counted, they're all there. As you can see the whole socket features a sturdy bolt-thru design.


Although the overwhelming majority of Core i7 motherboards will ship with three or six memory slots, Intel have gone with a four-slot design that is placed very close to the CPU socket. According to Intel, this layout ensures smoother, shorter data routing.

On the other hand, we really don't like the location of the 8-pin CPU power connector, since it's placed in between the IOH heatsink and the back of any installed graphics card. There is very likely an power routing reason for why it was placed in that location, but we hope other motherboard manufacturers place it closer to the edge of the motherboard.


Evidently this platform needs some serious juice as here we have a 12-volt auxiliary power connector. We will be testing the power consumption a little later. Thankfully, the 24-pin main power connector is located in the traditional location.


We are happy to see the SATA ports all along the motherboard's edge, but there is one flaw. If you use a dual-slot graphics card that is 10-inches long, you lose access to one SATA port. If you use two such cards, you lose access to three ports in total. This is slightly disappointing, but regrettably all too common. The ICH10 southbridge is cooled by a small but capable heatsink.


The Smackover comes with one legacy PCI slot, two PCI-E x1 slots, one PCI-E x4 slot, and two mighty PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots. The x16 slots are well-spaced, so all but the most radical cooling solutions should fit without any issues.


The rear I/O panel looks a little sparse, and there is very good reason for this...no more legacy PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports! That's right folks, if you want to use this motherboard you are going to have to kiss that beige keyboard and ball mouse goodbye.
The remaining ports are one Gigabit LAN, eight USB2.0, two eSATA, one FireWire, six audio jacks, optical and coaxial S/PDIF connectors.


Even though the X58 chipset doesn't really get particularly hot, Intel has nevertheless included a neat little glowing fan. Noise-o-phobics will be glad to know that it is barely audible.


Ok, these are just gratuitous drool-inducing hardware pics. By the way, don't get too excited, as mentioned previously the Smackover has actually not yet been certified for SLI. We will be taking a good look at multi-GPU scaling in an upcoming article.

Now it's high time for some actual benchmarks don't you agree? Keep on reading!