i7 860 still in daily use with a GTX 1650, maxed out RAM and SSD. Perfectly fine for Office, RUclips or login in remotely to work. And that with a 15 year old cpu. Now go back another 15 years and you are still in 486 country. Amazing the progress back then and on contrary: amazing how a 15 year old CPU is still so usable.
When this CPU was released in 2009, a 15 year old cpu would have been from 1994, which would be dx2/4 or a p75 or something, which could barely run windows 98 from 5 years later, but now a 15 year old processor can run the latest version of windows perfectly fine and only really struggles when you use heavy programs and the latest aaa games.
@@josephnorris4095 heck yeah it is. I'm almost 40 so I remember opening task manager in windows 98...there's a lot more things in there now. That's the tip of the iceberg. The newer Linux is pretty bloated too which is pretty sad, newer hardware does a lot better with Linux if you want to open firefox and have a smooth experience.
@@elu9780 Backlash over DEI quotas would be my guess, maybe related to the practice of hiring consultancy firms like Sweet Baby Inc and alienating potential audiences in the process of doing so.
These cpu's the I7 920 Nehalem a thing with it's AVX though. That Francisco intel engineer guy deleted my comments & posts on a tech forum, cause I proved it from PDF's they've hid & later removed the PDF after words. Anyways this cpu could take parts of it's SSE 2/3 4.1/4..2 code & use it to feed parts of it's AVX FP unit to speed things up. I found this in intel patens that's how Intel was gaining a 15% increase in IPC over AMD at the time. It wasn't true pure IPC, it was pseudo bullshit hack speed up. Image if you could get that speed up from Zen 5 from AVX512 unit from Zen 4 AVX2 code. If you are wonder why we don't this with SSE code & AVX. It's not supposed to be doing it at all, because it's causes a rounding function error that's why it's not supposed to do it.
AVX requirements in some newer games got patched out post launch. Also, Lynnfield CPUs probably can't run games with hard AVX requirements that well anyway. They can however run 4-5 yo AAA games like RDR2 pretty well. I paired one with a RX570 and the GPU is the bottleneck iirc.
Not all new games mind you a lot of engines really don't care that much about AVX and many applications just doesn't use the instructions for compatibility with old office machines
My dad bought one of these in an Alienware in 2009, and it’s still my main desktop today. Got it paired with a GTX 1060 and an SSD and it has ran anything I’ve thrown at it, except Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for some reason. Even can capably run VR. I’ve considered upgrading, but I have a Steam Deck that can run most things well too and the combo gets me by pretty well.
It's amazing how cheap laptops and handhelds nowadays have much much more power than top of the line 15 year old parts. And all that using like a measly % of energy!
@@Nordlicht05 not really. Moore's law already died. What has improved is distributed computing with the "cloud" and efficiency but general consumer computing has at most come 50x this last 15 years.
I know someone who still dailies a system with a 1st gen i7, I recently did some maintenence for them aka clean out the dust and new thermal paste, but the machine itself runs as well as ever
Guy that used to own a computer shop 20~ minutes from me, was running a dual xeon system on the same socket with a 2080 last i heard, but he went out of business and moved out of state.
Same I know someone who dailies a i7 860. It had a 750Ti until it died and now it's a 1050Ti. He desperately needs a new CPU he can't play anything that isn't a 2D indie platformer.
My 2nd gen i3 handles computing just as well with an ssd. Yeah, it can't play games or stream online videos in 1080 seamlessly, but for everything else works just as fine.
I still have an i7920 running at 4ghz to this day on a 360 Corsair AIO and an EVGA X58 Classified board with 12gb of 1866 Corsair Dominator DDR3. It rarely sees 60c. Paired it with a 1660 Super and I use it as my HTPC. Still runs really well. Does everything I need it to. I play Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Honkai Star Rail and a bunch of retro stuff no problem at 1080p. It doesn't like 4K. I built a whole new rig for that.
out of curiosity did you play wuwa at launch? I remember ppl with top of the line systems struggling with optimization but it seemed to be almost random. it did just fine on my ryzen 5 with 3060 laptop, but with all the complaints I saw before it got patched I'm wondering how it ran for you back then.
Old/light enough retro & indie games should run well enough. For example, Dread Templar & GRID run at smooth & steady 60fps @4k (4xDSR with 1080p display) on my i7-920 w/1050ti.
@@0v_x0 I'm not OP but I'd except it was playable but with some frame drops. But definitely not 60fps at least based on my testing with an i7-950 @ 4.0GHz + GTX 970 (even at low resolution to eliminate GPU bottleneck) in Wuwa 1.1 For 1.0 I only tested the i7-950 at stock and with a much slower GTX 660. In combat it usually dropped below 30fps but other than that it was mostly above 30fps and GPU bound
These earned me so much money, sold loads from discarded office dells. Nowadays, you can barely sell them at all anymore. Big issue is the lack of instruction sets that even less intensive newer games require. Also the much better performing 2nd gen is getting dirt cheap, and 1156 motherboards are getting a bit scarce
boy that first round of nehalem reviews were so exciting. even the i7-920 had just bonkers performance and headroom. i’m still running an i7-990x too! …in a retro rig, but still.
Heh... my 14yo i7-980x is still up and running (for all 14 years at an all core 4.14GHz OC... on standard voltages!). It's one of those machines that was far too cool to scrap. While I had to work around the installer nonsense, it's runs Windows 11 23H2 very nicely. LGA1366 for life.
@@smakfu1375 Still running my 775 and X79 xeon rigs. Somehow I skipped that generation because the jump from core 2 quad to i7 wasn't as big as it seemed. And those i7's were FREAKING EXPENSIVE back then. The 2008 crysis made them basically unottainable. It is funny how you can get them almost dime for a dozen nowadays!
@thetechfromheaven I actually upgraded back then from a Q6600 overclocked.to an i7 920 overclocked... difference at the time wasn't as big but as newer gpus came along it showed just how much more.powerful 1366 was. Even up to the 8700k the trippe channel memory meant it matched DDR4 speeds so games that wanted that memory speed it could handle fine. Eventually ended up with a lapped Xeon 5675 in there hitting 4.7ghz on water 24gb ram and multiple ssds in raid 0 and stopped caring about voltage at this point 6 core xeons were very very cheap. That ended its life with a 1080ti. I then went Z390 9900k which I'm still running now, but next year it's getting an upgrade. Waiting to see about the AMD 9000 series X3D cpus.
@@yonumpty i had my Azus P6T with Deluxe V2 modded bios, i7 920 then upgraded to x5650, when it blew up at 5.2GHz i bought the x5680 and i put it at 4.2. I had a GTX970 but that didn't keep up even with 300W mod, so i bought a RTX3060 12GB for it. Beats the hell out of my 6600k at 4.6ghz lol, 7700k don't have much of a chance hahaha I neded 240mm watercooler i built myself for it, and 2 power supply's were burned down the way until i went with Seasonic I coundn't get ram speeds higher than 1800+- with 6 stick's
Another fun fact: the "k" tag on the end of processor names didn't start until Sandy bridge. I've heard that all first gen i5s & i7s can be overclocked. Some RUclipsrs have pushed them far enough that these CPUs can rub elbows with processors that came out generations later.
There was the i7-875K which is multiplier unlocked. But like you said all first gen Core i CPUs can be overclocked by upping the BCLK without having to touch the multiplier. BCLK overclocking pretty much died with Sandy Bridge except for some exceptions. For example there is some modern boards with an external clock gen that can be used to overclock 12th gen locked CPUs.
The problem with modern GPU is, that they require UEFI. Some motherboards got updates, if their UEFI was "not good enough" and newer GPUs started to work on them. Some GPUs got firmware updates to play nice with older motherboards. If both did not get an according update, they will not work together. Besides of that, the Radeon R9 did decrease performance. The architecture and drivers had been so bad, that some games would create enough drawing calls to oversaturate 1 core and drop performance by 70% . If I recall correctly the devs of Assetto Corsa 1 detected this issue and asked AMD for help. To make it a fair test, you would need to use a RX480. Vega 56 and 64 are out, because they share the same problems the older Radeons have and Navi GPUs need a "good enough UEFI" too.
I'm curious to know just where the cutoff line is. Intel 70 series chipset boards from 2012 fully supported UEFI because of Windows 8, so these cards should go that far back without issues, in theory. 60 series was transitional, as their UEFI was in the weird transition phase. 50 series was early UEFI that looked and behaved like traditional BIOS.
If it's over saturating 1 core that's a game engine problem technically not the gpu's problem or the cpu's problem. Just means that their code for the game didn't spawn thread properly at what the driver called for. Most likely due to latency penalties for syncing threads. game engines brain dead solution: Well if we don't use more threads, we don't need to sync Genuis!!! THROW IT ALL ONE CORE.... game engine algorithms can be so stupid sometimes smh
I had Intel Desktop Board DH55TC, it was terrible and I trowed it away. It was too picky for memmory, graphics card and even USB drives, it didn't liked my 64GB SanDisk USB 3.1 flasdrive. I don't recomend using Intel Desktop Boards. They are the same shit as these Foxconn borads, just under Intel name.😂
The supported limit of graphic cards for this platform is Vega and GTX series. I'm running Xeon X 3460 that is equivalent to that I7 and it is running just fine today!
Considering that new, unoriginal games are becoming less necessary for many, justifying a new PC is no longer essential. The biggest win today is making an old machine work. The majority of the games we have now, with a lot of players, are free-to-play, and most of them can be run on the PC you showcased today without any problems. Awesome review and coverage on this topic!
I remember playing Empire Total War on release and the intro screens kept taunting me to upgrade to this CPU. I was on a Q6600 which wasn't too bad at all.
I bought an i7 just after launch to replace an aging socket 939 Athlon 64. I upgraded it after a couple of years to a total of 20 GB Ram and a SATA SSD which gave it another couple of years until I finally decomissioned the system after 10 years. And that was because I wanted something new, I could have used it for another 2 or 3 years if I wanted to.
I daily drive an i7-3770 w/ GTX 980 which I got reacently but only 6 months ago I was using a core 2 quad q8200 w/ GT640. I only upgraded because beamNG didn't run great with many vehicles on it. The core 2 quad is now a machine that I use as server/dvd ripper/vhs recorder. I've honestly never used a computer above 4th gen aside from school computers and friends computers, because there just isn't any need to upgrade to them for 99% of situations. My current setup maxs out every game I play and its 12 years old...
@GodEmperorofmankind1 Yeah, that really surprised me, too. I've never played RDR2, but I've seen hundreds of benchmark videos, and this first-generation I7 impressed the hell out of me. I run an E3 1230v2 (I7 3770-ish) processor even today, and I love its performance with an rx580 8gb.
@@thomaswest2583 Resolution is only to emphasize the maximum capabilities of the processor in the game by decreasing the burden from the GPU. If it can get 60fps at 720P, it can get 60 fps at 4k.
My Core i7-860 in a Dell XPS 8100 just got a new video card yesterday, the 1GB GTS 450. Also upgraded the ram from 8-16GB since I had some spare parts laying around. Just one of the many old PC's I have and play with from time to time. 😁
only issue with these first gen core series, is that they are missing some instruction sets that are needed to play some of the newer games, for example COD.
I remember this chip. I wanted one so much when it came out, but could not afford it. I had a Q6600 back then. Later I got my hands on a Q9650 and kept it until 2014 when I upgraded to the 4790k. P.S. Get well soon!
I built an i7 950 rig in 2014, i.e right in the middle of the Intel stagnation, and it was massively great value for the money. It also performed more like a Sandy Bridge machine with 1600 MHz DDR3 (which was dirt cheap by then) as fast RAM boosted Nehalem like crazy. Something important was clearly tied to it.
I'm watching this video on a i7 920 PC that I got for free some years ago. Two decades ago a PC that was more than 2 years old felt slow, however this PC still feels fast enough for every day use.
With prices so out of my budget for modern hardware, My PC history revolved around prior gen 2nd hand/refurbished parts. I now have 5 working systems (3 unused) and 4 processors without motherboards. My current daily driver is a Xeon E3 1270 V2(I7 3770k base equivalent), and my oldest equipment is a Pentium 4 640 system and a Phenom x4 9850 processor which is rather hard to find a mobo nowadays, being a 125w TDP processor. Videos that feature older hardware in use nowadays are a highlight for me to watch in YT. Keep up the good work keeping the old flames of burning passion alight for crusty older folks like me! 😊😊😊
I recently started using Windows Vista x64 on my Xeon W3565 LGA1366, 24GB (6x 4GB) DDR3 1600, Nice Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R motherboard, 512GB SATS SSD, GeForce GTX 980Ti and 1,6kW Superflower Leadex Titanium powersupply. The Windows Vista is working just so smoothly, and so stable with my hardware configuration.
With those specs, Vista would indeed run smooth as hell, benefitted as well by having very mature drivers by this point for the hardware. So much of Vista's bad rep came from seriously underpowered hardware at the time of release plus horrible drivers.
I had a 920. The 1366's were absolute beasts. They had 40 PCIe lanes in what was left of the North Bridge and in multi GPU setups, they could throw an insane amount of weight around, even compared to their descendants. I've been running a 5820k for the past decade, and with modest GPU and SSD upgrades over time, it's been keeping pace with damn near everything I've thrown at it.
Those were the days when I thought all i3s i5s i7s and i9s are the same throughout 5 years with no regards given to generations. Learned the hard way after buying supposed used Gaming Laptop with first generation i3 which sucked so hard, it made me to learn about Intel naming scheme.
My first desktop I bought for myself was an I5 650, 8GB of ram, and a 750 ti. It was an HP desktop that I added a GPU and more storage to. I later upgraded to an I7 875K, which was my first I7. It lasted a long time, and I remember I was able to later over clock it to 4.2GHz stable with a scythe cooler, asrock motherboard, and a cheap $25 case. Lasted me till I finally pulled the trigger on a ryzen 1600x.
I ran an i7 875k from 2010 to 2017 and I only upgraded when a friend got me a once in a lifetime deal on a new gaming pc. I‘ve been thinking of building a system around it using a modern GPU and an AIO to see how high I can overclock it. I think you’ve inspired me to do that!
it goes to show if you bought an i7 back in the day you did not have to upgrade as often, i went from an i7 2600 to an i7 8700k to get a good real world boost in performance. Might upgrade in a year or two lol
Great video, and I love the detailed testing, benchmarks, and information. Lately I've been taking old PCs left for junk (literally on the side of the road in some cases) and seeing what I can do with them. Most of them are old Dell models with strange motherboard layouts, fan shrouds, cases, connectors, etc., but I can get them running to play around and learn. One recent find had an I5-4440, which is a fairly fast and capable CPU. With 16GB, Windows 10, and a 512GB SSD, and a moderate GPU (GT 1030), it feels pretty much like any modern PC, as you note in your video with the I7-860. I'm going to check out your other videos, and will look forward to what you explore next.
Up until early 2019, I was using the Xeon X3470, which was basically the i7 870. That thing was an absolute champ. Had 24gb ram with it, and an RX 480. That system took me incredibly far and ran like an absolute treat.
perfect timing, i just built a pc with this processor today for fun. love to see the improvised cooling solution too, i mounted an old socket 775 cooler to my board (which cost me 2€ in an auction btw 😂)
I still have my i7-920 system that I got back in 2009. It originally came with Windows Vista and managed to get free upgrades to Windows 7, 10 and 11. I replaced it in 2016 with an i7-6800K system but still use the old one today to play around with from time to time. The replacement computer is still holding up well after 8 years.
One of my current projects in an I7 980X with the aim of filling every expansion slot with add in cards. dont know why but i do love the 1366 systems. never tried an 1156 but i may have to pick one up.
Great video! would love to see you cover those old Pentiums that were hyperthreaded! I got one of them for college back in 2006ish. Wasn't great but wasn't horrible either!💚
The i7 920 was the best PC component I have ever bought and I'm dealing with PCs since 1991 (IBM & Win 3.1). It ran 4.2Ghz for 10 years until I retired it. I kept it (along side with the ASUS X58-UD5), for sentimental reasons. That's how good of an impression the good'ol i7 left on me.
Hey mate, ive noticed you have some interesting cars, ever planing about posting about them? In some older video i saw a e36 that looked super clean and im curious 😅
Something interesting about first gen i7 laptop processors is that the dual core versions had hd integrated graphics while the quad core versions had no graphics at all. Laptops with the quad cores were usually the high performance work station that had dedicated graphics, and so they didn't get good battery life since it used the dedicated graphics all the time.
This is why I keep an X58 board in my stash, it's super versatile and performs when needed. Mine has a 6-core Xeon W series on it at 4GHz. It even ran an AMD 5700XT for a short while when my Ryzen system needed a new board.
I had an i5 750i back in the day. 1156 was a dead end. It was so dead in fact that not even a necromancer could reanimate it. I was stuck with that system until 2019 when Ryzen made it possible to get a decent CPU without breaking the bank.
Did the same, but went from a am3 socket x4 something to a Ryzen 2700x with 16gb and a rx 580 5 gb, build the whole system for under €500 then, with usage of some new and some used parts, still holds up well with almost all I throw at it...
Still have my old Acer Predator G5900 with the i7-870/6GB DDR3/HD 5570. Was a demo unit from a local office supply retailer, and had the funky optical drive doors busted off, so was a great deal for $500 CAD back in 2010. Spent so many hours in EvE Online on that system, now my wife's using it to run the Cricut in her craft room.
After my AMD FX-9590 PC build finally decided to toast itself, I switched to Intel and built myself a new PC using an i7 3770K. Had it for a while then built another PC with an Intel i7 4790K. Once the Intel i9 Processors were released, I then built myself an ITX system with an i9 9900K that I still use today for all my gaming, rendering, editing, and occasionally run VM's.
From 2017 to 2020 I made a fortune upgrading unwanted x58 systems to a 6-Core Xeon, adding more RAM, adding a SSD, and a cleaned up RX 580. If you're still on the x58 platform, then your board might be able to handle one of these Xeons. I recommend the x5675 the most because it has decent OC headroom and it the fastest 95w TDP one of the bunch. Out of all of Intel's 115x/1200 platforms, I never had the pleasure of owning or using the lga1156 platform.
This era of hardware was what I built my first system with, although I could only afford the i5-750 so I never got to try the i7's, but coming from a celeron d it was such a gigantic step up that it has stuck with me as one of my all-time favourite CPUs. Bclk overclocking is such great fun, setting the CPU to 200MHz bclk and a 21x multiplier with the requisite vcore increase was so gratifying. Sandy Bridge was an enormous upgrade over Nehalem and is also one of my all-time favourites, but Nehalem has a special place in my heart and without that i5-750 system I might never have ended where I am today. If you weren't there when these chips were new you missed out on something special, just as I did with not being into computers for the pentium 3 or the 486. Budget Builds is right, raw numbers don't tell the whole story, the hardware has something special about it that can't be benchmarked, only experienced.
I have an old Dell Precision that originally came with an i5. I found a cheap i7 860 online and paired it with a used Nvidia 960 and it does a good job as our living room PC. I'm looking to replace it, but I'm going to use it for my personal home office PC; the old dual 4-core Xeon PC I'm using now is a power hog.
Nice to see the test of this old masterpeace of CPU-development. As you mentioned Green Ham did that years before and for me it seems this CPU has aged very well. That is something I really celebrate. 😄
Used to run an i7-860 overclocked to 3.6GHz all the way until the i7-9700k got cheap. Even then, it wasn't so much that the 860 was failing to work for me, it just felt like a good deal to jump on the 9700k at the time. That 860 was a real workhorse and was my first "real" gaming PC build.
Having moved from an i7-860, to an i7-7700k in 2017 (and i'm still 'stuck' with that system/cpu atm) - I can say that the 860 is not good enough for most modern games, anything with lots of crowds (game AI etc) really take a hit... And honestly, never heard or saw anyone refer to it as a suped up C2Quad
I'm currently still "stuck" with an I7 3770 equivalent Xeon e3 1230v2. It does what I need paired with an rx580 8gb and 16gb ddr3 1600. It may not be impressive to most people, but it impresses me every day.
@@GodSaveTheUnitedStates the 3770 (and similar) was a beast for its time, and is still decent now - unless you're playing heavy AAA titles... I upgraded because it was struggling with the games I was playing at the time, oh, and funds fell at the right time to be able to do it too :)
@Ghozer I feel that. Lol. I will upgrade eventually. Thinking about going with a ryzen 5 3600 core system first and upgrading my rx580 sometime thereafter. Maybe an rtx 3060 would pair well with the 3600. Either way used deals for all the components have gotten quite reasonable (atleast compared to the 2020 to 2022 timeframe) lol.
I still commonly flip old office i7 8xx and 2xxx computers as ultra budget builds with RX 580s and 5500s. For what commonly amounts to $100-$150 for me, and subsequently $150-$200 for the buyer, they're sneaky good systems for kids, or stopgap systems for people who web browse and sometimes game, which is wild. Those days are coming to an end very soon, but the longevity of that platform is still extremely impressive.
When I first was getting a pc(s) going for my kids I started out with an i7 875k, 16gb ddr3 1066hz ram and I tried parry it with a gtx 1080 and it was a stuttery mess so I swapped it out with a rx 580 and it smoothed it out got more fps too even played games alot of recent games for 2022/2023
The i7 has always held up well over the years. My daily rig runs an i7 10700F, and being that I'm not a gamer, it's way faster than anything I'll ever use it for
When I first got my second ever gaming PC (Pre-built) JUST as Windows Vista launched (which Vista Ultimate 64-bit came pre-installed too with the build)... I was unbeatably happy with the OS from the get-go despite it's flaws. FAR more than I ever loved XP.
Had a i7 950 for 10+ years and was great till the mobo died and upgraded, would have easily used it for 5 or more years, did everything I wanted, games were the main use for my system. I could be still using it, should be fine for games with a decent Videocard and ssd,Ram upgrade ":)
I recently pulled an i7-870 out of an OEM system, which led me down a huge rabbit hole to learn about all this "Core i" stuff over the past few months, since I stopped building PCs way back in the early Core 2 Duo / Quad days. The first gen really does seem like that bridge generation while Intel was figuring out how to recover from the Pentium 4, and offer compelling multi-core solutions.
Yeah it really was the bridging generation chip. The top end i7 chips are still usable as this vid shows, but the experience is not nearly as nice on the i3 or even lower end i5 chips. Dual core chips just have no grunt anymore and even quad core can get limited these days.
I'm still using my XEON X5670 which replaced my i7-920, with an ASUS P6T Deluxe board and a GTX 780 ti. Still using Windows 7 with it too. Does everything I need it for, including playing games! 👍👍
Mesh architecture is what modern CPU's use. This one uses a different architecture called Ring architecture that makes it so uniquely powerful for gaming
I currently use a Ryzen 7 5800h and a RTX 3060 laptop. I still go back to use my old core i5-4258u, which is a dual core CPU, and it still runs both macOS and Windows 10 fine. It does feel slower but not horrible. I also have a laptop with a i7-7700hq that also still feels great running windows 11. Now CPU does matter as IPC has improved so much since then but that’s for gaming. Your average person would be fine with an older CPU as long as they have enough ram and an SSD most would be fine I wouldn’t recommend these older chips for modern gaming as even the i7-4770K would be heavily CPU limited even with a 3050.
I have this same i7 in my Linux rig. Runs great and handles every game I enjoy playing. Sure, I have a 1080ti and 32gb of ram but still. CPU intensive tasks are no issue. This is definitely my favorite Intel processor.
I'm curently used i7 870 and two 5870 in CF for my retro gaming pc, like Serious Sam First and Second Encounter, Diablo 2, Red Alert 2, Tiberian Sun, Freelancer and Far Cry 1, 2, 3 and Assassin Creen 1 to Black Flag.
BeamNG is generally system heavy when you add more vehicles, my Ryzen 7 5900x system starts to dip under 30fps on ultra settings when I load more than 20 on screen and they're parked not doing anything.
I sort of regret not holding onto any of these in the collection. Most customers I had were still on Core 2 Quad, then jumped to Sandy Bridge. I had one personally, but of course swapped up also.
Couldn't agree more. I run the Xeon X3470 (4C 8T @ 2.93 GHz) on the lga1156 and use it every day. No issues at all, it just works fine for almost anything you throw at it. I also have a Ryzen 1700 pc but I notice hardly any difference with daily tasks. As an average pc user you ask yourself what have they've been doing all these years? Selling you a new pc you didn't need is the answer.
Over my left shoulder there's an Asus Maximus III Xtreme P55 mainboard with an intel Core i7-875k first gen i7 16 gb of ram a 120gb ssd 1tb hdd and an R9 290 4GB for the gpu. Still runs everything it can run pretty decently. 15 years ago from today: Core i7 2.83GHz with turbos to 3.6GHz. 15 years before that: single core pentium 75MHz CPU. it has deffinitely slowed down, exponentially.
Very nice video as usual! By sheer coincidence I'm going to build myself a "new" Linux workstation using an i7-970. the six-core 12 threaded chungus of a chip, fitted in a slightly bonkers ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer motherboard, a little bucket of RAM, Quadro K4200 and custom water cooling. :D
I currently have a haswell as daily driver. I found a modded bios with NVME support. With a PCIe to M.2 adapter is feels like new even under Windows 11.
I have a i7-640M (2.8Ghz 2C 4HT) in the laptop at work. Slightly slower than the Xeon E5450 (3Ghz 4C) at home, but still very usable for daily office tasks.
I think you have touched upon a point that Microsoft has realized which is why they have attempted to remove compatibility in Windows 11. This seems counter-intuitive to me but then again, I don't work for them. If you have a computer, regardless of age, that works for you... why not continue to use it?
I still have my socket 1366 X58 motherboard which originally had an i7-920, which easily over clocked to 4.0Ghz. Last year I upgraded it to an i7-980 and it OCed to 4.2Ghz and it still holds up great. It plays almost every game I want perfectly with a GTX 1070 and doesn't seem to be bottle necking it at all. The only downside is that it doesn't have AVX instruction set so it can't play Helldivers 2. That is the only reason I am considering upgrading the system. (Oh and it consumes nearly 150w at idle when overclocked/overvolted)
i7 860 still in daily use with a GTX 1650, maxed out RAM and SSD. Perfectly fine for Office, RUclips or login in remotely to work. And that with a 15 year old cpu. Now go back another 15 years and you are still in 486 country. Amazing the progress back then and on contrary: amazing how a 15 year old CPU is still so usable.
I still have a 486 DX2 66 in the loft somewhere, probably next to the Commodore Amiga and Speccy +2
@@djaybeetoowill receive a 486 dx2 66 as gift from a customer in a few weeks, after they upgrade it...
It's still in daily use!
Microsoft and Intel are working on that.
@@LastExile1989 sadly yes. Windows 10 runs absolutely smoothly
Wow. Do you use an abacus as well?
When this CPU was released in 2009, a 15 year old cpu would have been from 1994, which would be dx2/4 or a p75 or something, which could barely run windows 98 from 5 years later, but now a 15 year old processor can run the latest version of windows perfectly fine and only really struggles when you use heavy programs and the latest aaa games.
Well, technology development slowed down.
And yet, some folks will claim Windows is bloated and slow, go figure.
@@josephnorris4095 it is
Pentium 75 could run w98 just fine.
@@josephnorris4095 heck yeah it is. I'm almost 40 so I remember opening task manager in windows 98...there's a lot more things in there now. That's the tip of the iceberg. The newer Linux is pretty bloated too which is pretty sad, newer hardware does a lot better with Linux if you want to open firefox and have a smooth experience.
A wild modern AAA game appears.
Modern AAA game uses AVX instruction set.
It's super effective.
i7-860 faints.
Some AAA games even require AVX2 which was first added on 4th gen / Haswell
@@TheDiner50 what political social nonsense?
@@elu9780 Backlash over DEI quotas would be my guess, maybe related to the practice of hiring consultancy firms like Sweet Baby Inc and alienating potential audiences in the process of doing so.
These cpu's the I7 920 Nehalem a thing with it's AVX though. That Francisco intel engineer guy deleted my comments & posts on a tech forum, cause I proved it from PDF's they've hid & later removed the PDF after words.
Anyways this cpu could take parts of it's SSE 2/3 4.1/4..2 code & use it to feed parts of it's AVX FP unit to speed things up. I found this in intel patens that's how Intel was gaining a 15% increase in IPC over AMD at the time. It wasn't true pure IPC, it was pseudo bullshit hack speed up. Image if you could get that speed up from Zen 5 from AVX512 unit from Zen 4 AVX2 code. If you are wonder why we don't this with SSE code & AVX. It's not supposed to be doing it at all, because it's causes a rounding function error that's why it's not supposed to do it.
AVX requirements in some newer games got patched out post launch. Also, Lynnfield CPUs probably can't run games with hard AVX requirements that well anyway. They can however run 4-5 yo AAA games like RDR2 pretty well. I paired one with a RX570 and the GPU is the bottleneck iirc.
Maybe the real i7s were the friends we made along the way
Err... No
Maybe the real i7 is the i3 you were able to afford. 😂
Will the real i7 please stand up, please stand up.
Maybe the real i7s are the modded 771, x58/79/99 Xeons we all made along the way
The real i7s were the pentiums we met along the way
"...only thing limiting these processors really is graphic cards..."
You forgot to mention AVX support, which newer games utilize and require.
Not all new games mind you a lot of engines really don't care that much about AVX and many applications just doesn't use the instructions for compatibility with old office machines
My dad bought one of these in an Alienware in 2009, and it’s still my main desktop today. Got it paired with a GTX 1060 and an SSD and it has ran anything I’ve thrown at it, except Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for some reason. Even can capably run VR.
I’ve considered upgrading, but I have a Steam Deck that can run most things well too and the combo gets me by pretty well.
It's amazing how cheap laptops and handhelds nowadays have much much more power than top of the line 15 year old parts. And all that using like a measly % of energy!
@@thetechfromheaven Steam Deck is much less powerful than 1060.
Cyberpunk??
@@thetechfromheaven date 15 years down from 2009 . Pcs are a quintillion times faster
@@Nordlicht05 not really. Moore's law already died. What has improved is distributed computing with the "cloud" and efficiency but general consumer computing has at most come 50x this last 15 years.
I know someone who still dailies a system with a 1st gen i7, I recently did some maintenence for them aka clean out the dust and new thermal paste, but the machine itself runs as well as ever
Guy that used to own a computer shop 20~ minutes from me, was running a dual xeon system on the same socket with a 2080 last i heard, but he went out of business and moved out of state.
Same I know someone who dailies a i7 860. It had a 750Ti until it died and now it's a 1050Ti. He desperately needs a new CPU he can't play anything that isn't a 2D indie platformer.
Still rocking my i7 2600 non k
Those were made to last. Solid capacitors are a tech miracle that are helping our HW survive a long time.
My 2nd gen i3 handles computing just as well with an ssd. Yeah, it can't play games or stream online videos in 1080 seamlessly, but for everything else works just as fine.
I still have an i7920 running at 4ghz to this day on a 360 Corsair AIO and an EVGA X58 Classified board with 12gb of 1866 Corsair Dominator DDR3. It rarely sees 60c. Paired it with a 1660 Super and I use it as my HTPC. Still runs really well. Does everything I need it to. I play Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Honkai Star Rail and a bunch of retro stuff no problem at 1080p. It doesn't like 4K. I built a whole new rig for that.
have you seen any difference between 1600 and 1866 mt ram?
out of curiosity did you play wuwa at launch? I remember ppl with top of the line systems struggling with optimization but it seemed to be almost random. it did just fine on my ryzen 5 with 3060 laptop, but with all the complaints I saw before it got patched I'm wondering how it ran for you back then.
Old/light enough retro & indie games should run well enough. For example, Dread Templar & GRID run at smooth & steady 60fps @4k (4xDSR with 1080p display) on my i7-920 w/1050ti.
@@0v_x0 I'm not OP but I'd except it was playable but with some frame drops. But definitely not 60fps at least based on my testing with an i7-950 @ 4.0GHz + GTX 970 (even at low resolution to eliminate GPU bottleneck) in Wuwa 1.1
For 1.0 I only tested the i7-950 at stock and with a much slower GTX 660. In combat it usually dropped below 30fps but other than that it was mostly above 30fps and GPU bound
@@Pasi123 cheers, thanks for the reply
These earned me so much money, sold loads from discarded office dells. Nowadays, you can barely sell them at all anymore. Big issue is the lack of instruction sets that even less intensive newer games require. Also the much better performing 2nd gen is getting dirt cheap, and 1156 motherboards are getting a bit scarce
boy that first round of nehalem reviews were so exciting. even the i7-920 had just bonkers performance and headroom.
i’m still running an i7-990x too! …in a retro rig, but still.
Heh... my 14yo i7-980x is still up and running (for all 14 years at an all core 4.14GHz OC... on standard voltages!). It's one of those machines that was far too cool to scrap. While I had to work around the installer nonsense, it's runs Windows 11 23H2 very nicely. LGA1366 for life.
@@smakfu1375 Still running my 775 and X79 xeon rigs. Somehow I skipped that generation because the jump from core 2 quad to i7 wasn't as big as it seemed. And those i7's were FREAKING EXPENSIVE back then. The 2008 crysis made them basically unottainable. It is funny how you can get them almost dime for a dozen nowadays!
@thetechfromheaven I actually upgraded back then from a Q6600 overclocked.to an i7 920 overclocked... difference at the time wasn't as big but as newer gpus came along it showed just how much more.powerful 1366 was. Even up to the 8700k the trippe channel memory meant it matched DDR4 speeds so games that wanted that memory speed it could handle fine.
Eventually ended up with a lapped Xeon 5675 in there hitting 4.7ghz on water 24gb ram and multiple ssds in raid 0 and stopped caring about voltage at this point 6 core xeons were very very cheap. That ended its life with a 1080ti. I then went Z390 9900k which I'm still running now, but next year it's getting an upgrade. Waiting to see about the AMD 9000 series X3D cpus.
@@yonumpty i had my Azus P6T with Deluxe V2 modded bios, i7 920 then upgraded to x5650, when it blew up at 5.2GHz i bought the x5680 and i put it at 4.2. I had a GTX970 but that didn't keep up even with 300W mod, so i bought a RTX3060 12GB for it.
Beats the hell out of my 6600k at 4.6ghz lol, 7700k don't have much of a chance hahaha
I neded 240mm watercooler i built myself for it, and 2 power supply's were burned down the way until i went with Seasonic
I coundn't get ram speeds higher than 1800+- with 6 stick's
i am jealous lol i wanted a retro 990x build but instead went with a qx9650 due to the price difference.
Love these longer videos! Definitely keep up the good work👍👍
Another fun fact: the "k" tag on the end of processor names didn't start until Sandy bridge. I've heard that all first gen i5s & i7s can be overclocked. Some RUclipsrs have pushed them far enough that these CPUs can rub elbows with processors that came out generations later.
There was the i7-875K which is multiplier unlocked. But like you said all first gen Core i CPUs can be overclocked by upping the BCLK without having to touch the multiplier. BCLK overclocking pretty much died with Sandy Bridge except for some exceptions. For example there is some modern boards with an external clock gen that can be used to overclock 12th gen locked CPUs.
The problem with modern GPU is, that they require UEFI.
Some motherboards got updates, if their UEFI was "not good enough" and newer GPUs started to work on them.
Some GPUs got firmware updates to play nice with older motherboards.
If both did not get an according update, they will not work together.
Besides of that, the Radeon R9 did decrease performance. The architecture and drivers had been so bad,
that some games would create enough drawing calls to oversaturate 1 core and drop performance by 70% .
If I recall correctly the devs of Assetto Corsa 1 detected this issue and asked AMD for help.
To make it a fair test, you would need to use a RX480.
Vega 56 and 64 are out, because they share the same problems the older Radeons have and Navi GPUs
need a "good enough UEFI" too.
I'm curious to know just where the cutoff line is. Intel 70 series chipset boards from 2012 fully supported UEFI because of Windows 8, so these cards should go that far back without issues, in theory. 60 series was transitional, as their UEFI was in the weird transition phase. 50 series was early UEFI that looked and behaved like traditional BIOS.
If it's over saturating 1 core that's a game engine problem
technically not the gpu's problem or the cpu's problem. Just means that their code for the game didn't spawn thread properly at what the driver called for. Most likely due to latency penalties for syncing threads.
game engines brain dead solution: Well if we don't use more threads, we don't need to sync
Genuis!!!
THROW IT ALL ONE CORE....
game engine algorithms can be so stupid sometimes
smh
Still on socket 1156, 13 years later. From i3 540 to i5 760 on the same chad intel motherboard and dual rank ddr3 ram. 😅
I had Intel Desktop Board DH55TC, it was terrible and I trowed it away. It was too picky for memmory, graphics card and even USB drives, it didn't liked my 64GB SanDisk USB 3.1 flasdrive. I don't recomend using Intel Desktop Boards. They are the same shit as these Foxconn borads, just under Intel name.😂
The supported limit of graphic cards for this platform is Vega and GTX series. I'm running Xeon X 3460 that is equivalent to that I7 and it is running just fine today!
Im using a X3470
Considering that new, unoriginal games are becoming less necessary for many, justifying a new PC is no longer essential. The biggest win today is making an old machine work. The majority of the games we have now, with a lot of players, are free-to-play, and most of them can be run on the PC you showcased today without any problems. Awesome review and coverage on this topic!
Don't forget that most AAA games are terrible
@@tobyzilla2.074 AA max 🤭
@@DanielCardei with me it's indie games
@@tobyzilla2.074 glorified Demo Software 😅
I remember playing Empire Total War on release and the intro screens kept taunting me to upgrade to this CPU. I was on a Q6600 which wasn't too bad at all.
The i7 marketing was so good that AMD had to counter them with Ryzen 7 ;D
I bought an i7 just after launch to replace an aging socket 939 Athlon 64. I upgraded it after a couple of years to a total of 20 GB Ram and a SATA SSD which gave it another couple of years until I finally decomissioned the system after 10 years. And that was because I wanted something new, I could have used it for another 2 or 3 years if I wanted to.
I daily drive an i7-3770 w/ GTX 980 which I got reacently but only 6 months ago I was using a core 2 quad q8200 w/ GT640. I only upgraded because beamNG didn't run great with many vehicles on it. The core 2 quad is now a machine that I use as server/dvd ripper/vhs recorder. I've honestly never used a computer above 4th gen aside from school computers and friends computers, because there just isn't any need to upgrade to them for 99% of situations. My current setup maxs out every game I play and its 12 years old...
THE FACT A 15 YEARS OLD PROCESSOR WAS ABLE TO PLAY RDR 2 AT 60 FPS.
why are you yelling?
@GodEmperorofmankind1 Yeah, that really surprised me, too. I've never played RDR2, but I've seen hundreds of benchmark videos, and this first-generation I7 impressed the hell out of me. I run an E3 1230v2 (I7 3770-ish) processor even today, and I love its performance with an rx580 8gb.
RDR 2 is 6 years old, so it is not that impressive. Especially considering that this i7 cost arm&leg when it came out.
Yeah at 720p not that impressive
@@thomaswest2583 Resolution is only to emphasize the maximum capabilities of the processor in the game by decreasing the burden from the GPU. If it can get 60fps at 720P, it can get 60 fps at 4k.
older i7s hold up amazingly well, i have a 13600kf in my main pc and the i7-2600 is still more than usable for me
My Core i7-860 in a Dell XPS 8100 just got a new video card yesterday, the 1GB GTS 450. Also upgraded the ram from 8-16GB since I had some spare parts laying around. Just one of the many old PC's I have and play with from time to time. 😁
It's not as obsolete as you might think. My old ass 720 QM handles Windows 11 well enough. My old ass AMD ATI Mobility 4650, on the other hand...
only issue with these first gen core series, is that they are missing some instruction sets that are needed to play some of the newer games, for example COD.
The First Core I7 was the i7 960 based on the X58 platform with Triple channel memory, get one of those and test that one
And then change the cpu to a xeon X5690. Excellent system.
I still use it for everything
My i7 3700K lasted me 8 years.
I remember this chip. I wanted one so much when it came out, but could not afford it. I had a Q6600 back then. Later I got my hands on a Q9650 and kept it until 2014 when I upgraded to the 4790k. P.S. Get well soon!
I built an i7 950 rig in 2014, i.e right in the middle of the Intel stagnation, and it was massively great value for the money. It also performed more like a Sandy Bridge machine with 1600 MHz DDR3 (which was dirt cheap by then) as fast RAM boosted Nehalem like crazy. Something important was clearly tied to it.
I'm watching this video on a i7 920 PC that I got for free some years ago. Two decades ago a PC that was more than 2 years old felt slow, however this PC still feels fast enough for every day use.
With prices so out of my budget for modern hardware, My PC history revolved around prior gen 2nd hand/refurbished parts. I now have 5 working systems (3 unused) and 4 processors without motherboards. My current daily driver is a Xeon E3 1270 V2(I7 3770k base equivalent), and my oldest equipment is a Pentium 4 640 system and a Phenom x4 9850 processor which is rather hard to find a mobo nowadays, being a 125w TDP processor.
Videos that feature older hardware in use nowadays are a highlight for me to watch in YT. Keep up the good work keeping the old flames of burning passion alight for crusty older folks like me! 😊😊😊
Owned an i3 540 since 2011. Used that in my main PC until 2017 and now my dad uses that PC for internet browsing with an R7 240.
I recently started using Windows Vista x64 on my Xeon W3565 LGA1366, 24GB (6x 4GB) DDR3 1600, Nice Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R motherboard, 512GB SATS SSD, GeForce GTX 980Ti and 1,6kW Superflower Leadex Titanium powersupply. The Windows Vista is working just so smoothly, and so stable with my hardware configuration.
With those specs, Vista would indeed run smooth as hell, benefitted as well by having very mature drivers by this point for the hardware. So much of Vista's bad rep came from seriously underpowered hardware at the time of release plus horrible drivers.
I feel like the I7 and advancements to performance started to slow down at 4th Gen Haswell as from there it was just extra plusses.
The difference from Sandy - Skylake (and all it’s refreshes) is only 25/30% in the real world generally.
I had a 920. The 1366's were absolute beasts. They had 40 PCIe lanes in what was left of the North Bridge and in multi GPU setups, they could throw an insane amount of weight around, even compared to their descendants.
I've been running a 5820k for the past decade, and with modest GPU and SSD upgrades over time, it's been keeping pace with damn near everything I've thrown at it.
Those were the days when I thought all i3s i5s i7s and i9s are the same throughout 5 years with no regards given to generations. Learned the hard way after buying supposed used Gaming Laptop with first generation i3 which sucked so hard, it made me to learn about Intel naming scheme.
perfect timing, with intel retiring the core i-series naming
My first desktop I bought for myself was an I5 650, 8GB of ram, and a 750 ti. It was an HP desktop that I added a GPU and more storage to.
I later upgraded to an I7 875K, which was my first I7. It lasted a long time, and I remember I was able to later over clock it to 4.2GHz stable with a scythe cooler, asrock motherboard, and a cheap $25 case. Lasted me till I finally pulled the trigger on a ryzen 1600x.
I ran an i7 875k from 2010 to 2017 and I only upgraded when a friend got me a once in a lifetime deal on a new gaming pc. I‘ve been thinking of building a system around it using a modern GPU and an AIO to see how high I can overclock it. I think you’ve inspired me to do that!
Excellent video. Absorbing to watch. Thank you and keep 'em coming!
it goes to show if you bought an i7 back in the day you did not have to upgrade as often, i went from an i7 2600 to an i7 8700k to get a good real world boost in performance. Might upgrade in a year or two lol
Great video, and I love the detailed testing, benchmarks, and information. Lately I've been taking old PCs left for junk (literally on the side of the road in some cases) and seeing what I can do with them. Most of them are old Dell models with strange motherboard layouts, fan shrouds, cases, connectors, etc., but I can get them running to play around and learn. One recent find had an I5-4440, which is a fairly fast and capable CPU. With 16GB, Windows 10, and a 512GB SSD, and a moderate GPU (GT 1030), it feels pretty much like any modern PC, as you note in your video with the I7-860.
I'm going to check out your other videos, and will look forward to what you explore next.
Watching this on a I7 3770 with Gtx 1650 attached to 4k TV. I7s will never die from a usability standpoint
Up until early 2019, I was using the Xeon X3470, which was basically the i7 870. That thing was an absolute champ. Had 24gb ram with it, and an RX 480. That system took me incredibly far and ran like an absolute treat.
perfect timing, i just built a pc with this processor today for fun. love to see the improvised cooling solution too, i mounted an old socket 775 cooler to my board (which cost me 2€ in an auction btw 😂)
I retired my I7 860 a long time ago and it has been used to run my UnRaid NAS for YEARS now... FLAWLESSLY!
I still have my i7-920 system that I got back in 2009. It originally came with Windows Vista and managed to get free upgrades to Windows 7, 10 and 11. I replaced it in 2016 with an i7-6800K system but still use the old one today to play around with from time to time. The replacement computer is still holding up well after 8 years.
Wow i did not expect the old i7 to run that well, awesome! And that for next to nothing. The sbsolute budget build :-) Thanks for the review
Didn't those overclock like crazy? You could probably easily get over 60fps averaged in those games.
One of my current projects in an I7 980X with the aim of filling every expansion slot with add in cards. dont know why but i do love the 1366 systems. never tried an 1156 but i may have to pick one up.
Great video! would love to see you cover those old Pentiums that were hyperthreaded! I got one of them for college back in 2006ish. Wasn't great but wasn't horrible either!💚
Still have an X58 rig as a backup. W3680 rather than 980X, but that Xeon has an unlocked multi and cost me half the price of the Extreme chip.
Still have one. It was my first and only intel build. I will hold onto it since I've regretted each and every PC I've parted with.
The i7 920 was the best PC component I have ever bought and I'm dealing with PCs since 1991 (IBM & Win 3.1). It ran 4.2Ghz for 10 years until I retired it. I kept it (along side with the ASUS X58-UD5), for sentimental reasons. That's how good of an impression the good'ol i7 left on me.
Hey mate, ive noticed you have some interesting cars, ever planing about posting about them? In some older video i saw a e36 that looked super clean and im curious 😅
I may have something planned soon 👍
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial cant wait
i7 860 really took amd 8 years to overcome it, I still remember when I was using fx9590 , crashed by my friends i7 860 oc 4.4😢
Something interesting about first gen i7 laptop processors is that the dual core versions had hd integrated graphics while the quad core versions had no graphics at all. Laptops with the quad cores were usually the high performance work station that had dedicated graphics, and so they didn't get good battery life since it used the dedicated graphics all the time.
This is why I keep an X58 board in my stash, it's super versatile and performs when needed. Mine has a 6-core Xeon W series on it at 4GHz. It even ran an AMD 5700XT for a short while when my Ryzen system needed a new board.
I had an i5 750i back in the day. 1156 was a dead end. It was so dead in fact that not even a necromancer could reanimate it. I was stuck with that system until 2019 when Ryzen made it possible to get a decent CPU without breaking the bank.
Did the same, but went from a am3 socket x4 something to a Ryzen 2700x with 16gb and a rx 580 5 gb, build the whole system for under €500 then, with usage of some new and some used parts, still holds up well with almost all I throw at it...
I just love the stone bird bath in any of your videos.
Still have my old Acer Predator G5900 with the i7-870/6GB DDR3/HD 5570. Was a demo unit from a local office supply retailer, and had the funky optical drive doors busted off, so was a great deal for $500 CAD back in 2010. Spent so many hours in EvE Online on that system, now my wife's using it to run the Cricut in her craft room.
After my AMD FX-9590 PC build finally decided to toast itself, I switched to Intel and built myself a new PC using an i7 3770K. Had it for a while then built another PC with an Intel i7 4790K. Once the Intel i9 Processors were released, I then built myself an ITX system with an i9 9900K that I still use today for all my gaming, rendering, editing, and occasionally run VM's.
Love the KOTOR cantina background music!
From 2017 to 2020 I made a fortune upgrading unwanted x58 systems to a 6-Core Xeon, adding more RAM, adding a SSD, and a cleaned up RX 580. If you're still on the x58 platform, then your board might be able to handle one of these Xeons. I recommend the x5675 the most because it has decent OC headroom and it the fastest 95w TDP one of the bunch.
Out of all of Intel's 115x/1200 platforms, I never had the pleasure of owning or using the lga1156 platform.
man id love to see you do a vid on the tripple channel i7 990x
This era of hardware was what I built my first system with, although I could only afford the i5-750 so I never got to try the i7's, but coming from a celeron d it was such a gigantic step up that it has stuck with me as one of my all-time favourite CPUs.
Bclk overclocking is such great fun, setting the CPU to 200MHz bclk and a 21x multiplier with the requisite vcore increase was so gratifying.
Sandy Bridge was an enormous upgrade over Nehalem and is also one of my all-time favourites, but Nehalem has a special place in my heart and without that i5-750 system I might never have ended where I am today.
If you weren't there when these chips were new you missed out on something special, just as I did with not being into computers for the pentium 3 or the 486.
Budget Builds is right, raw numbers don't tell the whole story, the hardware has something special about it that can't be benchmarked, only experienced.
I have an old Dell Precision that originally came with an i5. I found a cheap i7 860 online and paired it with a used Nvidia 960 and it does a good job as our living room PC. I'm looking to replace it, but I'm going to use it for my personal home office PC; the old dual 4-core Xeon PC I'm using now is a power hog.
Nice to see the test of this old masterpeace of CPU-development. As you mentioned Green Ham did that years before and for me it seems this CPU has aged very well. That is something I really celebrate. 😄
I have an I7 4790 with a gtx1080 and 16g ram. it is the top of the 1150 socket and I have no plans to upgrade.
Used to run an i7-860 overclocked to 3.6GHz all the way until the i7-9700k got cheap. Even then, it wasn't so much that the 860 was failing to work for me, it just felt like a good deal to jump on the 9700k at the time. That 860 was a real workhorse and was my first "real" gaming PC build.
Me and my family are running this exactly CPU in a Dell Precision t1500 as a Plex box and it is working perfectly.
so happy you are posting a lot again
Having moved from an i7-860, to an i7-7700k in 2017 (and i'm still 'stuck' with that system/cpu atm) - I can say that the 860 is not good enough for most modern games, anything with lots of crowds (game AI etc) really take a hit...
And honestly, never heard or saw anyone refer to it as a suped up C2Quad
I'm currently still "stuck" with an I7 3770 equivalent Xeon e3 1230v2. It does what I need paired with an rx580 8gb and 16gb ddr3 1600. It may not be impressive to most people, but it impresses me every day.
@@GodSaveTheUnitedStates the 3770 (and similar) was a beast for its time, and is still decent now - unless you're playing heavy AAA titles... I upgraded because it was struggling with the games I was playing at the time, oh, and funds fell at the right time to be able to do it too :)
@Ghozer I feel that. Lol. I will upgrade eventually. Thinking about going with a ryzen 5 3600 core system first and upgrading my rx580 sometime thereafter. Maybe an rtx 3060 would pair well with the 3600. Either way used deals for all the components have gotten quite reasonable (atleast compared to the 2020 to 2022 timeframe) lol.
I still commonly flip old office i7 8xx and 2xxx computers as ultra budget builds with RX 580s and 5500s. For what commonly amounts to $100-$150 for me, and subsequently $150-$200 for the buyer, they're sneaky good systems for kids, or stopgap systems for people who web browse and sometimes game, which is wild. Those days are coming to an end very soon, but the longevity of that platform is still extremely impressive.
When I first was getting a pc(s) going for my kids I started out with an i7 875k, 16gb ddr3 1066hz ram and I tried parry it with a gtx 1080 and it was a stuttery mess so I swapped it out with a rx 580 and it smoothed it out got more fps too even played games alot of recent games for 2022/2023
The i7 has always held up well over the years. My daily rig runs an i7 10700F, and being that I'm not a gamer, it's way faster than anything I'll ever use it for
When I first got my second ever gaming PC (Pre-built) JUST as Windows Vista launched (which Vista Ultimate 64-bit came pre-installed too with the build)... I was unbeatably happy with the OS from the get-go despite it's flaws. FAR more than I ever loved XP.
I have a i7 860. Absolute beast for XP / Vista gaming when you pair it with a nice EAX compatible sound card.
I went from a Pentium D 920 to an i7 920...it was a crazy upgrade even for someone who started in the early Pentium days.
Had a i7 950 for 10+ years and was great till the mobo died and upgraded, would have easily used it for 5 or more years, did everything I wanted, games were the main use for my system.
I could be still using it, should be fine for games with a decent Videocard and ssd,Ram upgrade ":)
I upgraded my x58 system from an i7 920 to a Xeon x5670. Great pc
I recently pulled an i7-870 out of an OEM system, which led me down a huge rabbit hole to learn about all this "Core i" stuff over the past few months, since I stopped building PCs way back in the early Core 2 Duo / Quad days. The first gen really does seem like that bridge generation while Intel was figuring out how to recover from the Pentium 4, and offer compelling multi-core solutions.
Yeah it really was the bridging generation chip. The top end i7 chips are still usable as this vid shows, but the experience is not nearly as nice on the i3 or even lower end i5 chips. Dual core chips just have no grunt anymore and even quad core can get limited these days.
I'm still using my XEON X5670 which replaced my i7-920, with an ASUS P6T Deluxe board and a GTX 780 ti. Still using Windows 7 with it too. Does everything I need it for, including playing games! 👍👍
Mesh architecture is what modern CPU's use. This one uses a different architecture called Ring architecture that makes it so uniquely powerful for gaming
I currently use a Ryzen 7 5800h and a RTX 3060 laptop. I still go back to use my old core i5-4258u, which is a dual core CPU, and it still runs both macOS and Windows 10 fine. It does feel slower but not horrible. I also have a laptop with a i7-7700hq that also still feels great running windows 11.
Now CPU does matter as IPC has improved so much since then but that’s for gaming. Your average person would be fine with an older CPU as long as they have enough ram and an SSD most would be fine
I wouldn’t recommend these older chips for modern gaming as even the i7-4770K would be heavily CPU limited even with a 3050.
I have this same i7 in my Linux rig. Runs great and handles every game I enjoy playing. Sure, I have a 1080ti and 32gb of ram but still. CPU intensive tasks are no issue. This is definitely my favorite Intel processor.
I'm curently used i7 870 and two 5870 in CF for my retro gaming pc, like Serious Sam First and Second Encounter, Diablo 2, Red Alert 2, Tiberian Sun, Freelancer and Far Cry 1, 2, 3 and Assassin Creen 1 to Black Flag.
BeamNG is generally system heavy when you add more vehicles, my Ryzen 7 5900x system starts to dip under 30fps on ultra settings when I load more than 20 on screen and they're parked not doing anything.
I sort of regret not holding onto any of these in the collection. Most customers I had were still on Core 2 Quad, then jumped to Sandy Bridge. I had one personally, but of course swapped up also.
Couldn't agree more. I run the Xeon X3470 (4C 8T @ 2.93 GHz) on the lga1156 and use it every day. No issues at all, it just works fine for almost anything you throw at it. I also have a Ryzen 1700 pc but I notice hardly any difference with daily tasks. As an average pc user you ask yourself what have they've been doing all these years? Selling you a new pc you didn't need is the answer.
Over my left shoulder there's an Asus Maximus III Xtreme P55 mainboard with an intel Core i7-875k first gen i7 16 gb of ram a 120gb ssd 1tb hdd and an R9 290 4GB for the gpu. Still runs everything it can run pretty decently. 15 years ago from today: Core i7 2.83GHz with turbos to 3.6GHz. 15 years before that: single core pentium 75MHz CPU. it has deffinitely slowed down, exponentially.
Very nice video as usual! By sheer coincidence I'm going to build myself a "new" Linux workstation using an i7-970. the six-core 12 threaded chungus of a chip, fitted in a slightly bonkers ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer motherboard, a little bucket of RAM, Quadro K4200 and custom water cooling. :D
Oh man, I'm still having my Intel core i7 2700K and it still kicking as hell.
I'm a big haswell guy
i put a haswell computer together with spare parts for my brother a couple months ago and im so proud of it, it runs beautifully
i7 4770k lover :)
Using an I7 4790K and still running strong at 4.60GHz!
one of my brothers is still rocking a i7-4790k to this day, used it for 2 weeks when i had to replace his GPU and it's still a beast
I currently have a haswell as daily driver. I found a modded bios with NVME support. With a PCIe to M.2 adapter is feels like new even under Windows 11.
I have a i7-640M (2.8Ghz 2C 4HT) in the laptop at work. Slightly slower than the Xeon E5450 (3Ghz 4C) at home, but still very usable for daily office tasks.
I think you have touched upon a point that Microsoft has realized which is why they have attempted to remove compatibility in Windows 11. This seems counter-intuitive to me but then again, I don't work for them. If you have a computer, regardless of age, that works for you... why not continue to use it?
Good video. I used a xeon 6c/12 socket 1366 cpu for 7yrs. I only replaced it when I discovered that it severely bottlenecked my new rtx 2060.
I still have my socket 1366 X58 motherboard which originally had an i7-920, which easily over clocked to 4.0Ghz. Last year I upgraded it to an i7-980 and it OCed to 4.2Ghz and it still holds up great. It plays almost every game I want perfectly with a GTX 1070 and doesn't seem to be bottle necking it at all. The only downside is that it doesn't have AVX instruction set so it can't play Helldivers 2. That is the only reason I am considering upgrading the system. (Oh and it consumes nearly 150w at idle when overclocked/overvolted)
Back in the day it was common to hear "you dont need an i7 for gaming"