By Matthew DeCarlo, TechSpot.com
The folks at PCLab.pl have gotten their hands on a sample of Intel’s upcoming Gulftown Core i9 processor and put it through its paces. PCLab pitted the six-core chip against Intel’s Core i5, Core i7, Core 2 Quad and AMD’s Phenom II. The chip was tested in three separate motherboards, the Gigabyte EX58-Extreme, Asus Rampage II Gene, and Asus P6T SE.
Clocked at 2800MHz, the Core i9 beat the competition in a majority of the tests — especially those optimized for multi-core chips — but Gulftown slips behind its predecessors in many benchmarks. Intel’s upcoming hexa-core CPU takes the cake when it comes to tasks like video encoding, but those two additional cores make little to no real-world difference in most games and other standard use.
