Thanks a lot.
and please correct "The LGA1336 platform" on Page 3

Excellent review.

Now, if someone could find a hack to unlock hyperthreading on the i5-760, we would end up with the ultimate value leader.

It seems strange that board makers can unlock cores on AMD CPUs, but none of them seems interested in unlocking hyperthreading on Intel CPUs.

We know that the die is the same and that HT is locked because Intel has been selling the HT-unlock on a low-end Pentium.

Very nice review, excellent work indeed. Allow me to disagree on one thing, though: encryption isn't easily parallelized, in fact block ciphers as AES/Blowfish etc. are inherently sequential since every step requires the result of the previous. It's strange to see how that benchmark scales with core count, god knows what it really measures.

I'm skeptical whether the TrueCrypt encryption benchmark accurately measures the performance of the Intel processors with AES-NI instructions. I work with Bitlocker-encrypted desktops with Core i5-650s and one with X3570 (similar to the i7-960). Both the i5-650 and X3570 have the same baseline and turbo frequencies. Subjectively, the i5-650 boots, resumes from hibnernation, and opens app's a bit faster in spite of the X3570 having double the cache and double the cores. On Everest the i5-650 performance is far ahead of the X3570 on the AES test (and as far behind the X3570 on the CPU hash test, as expected). On Vantage PCMark (on my encrypted desktops) the i5-650 is faster than the X3570 on the communications and application launching tests where encryption acceleration should show itself. So, as the previous poster wondered, what does the TrueCrypt benchmark measure?

Absolutely interesting, i was looking for this guide, it is very complete and professional.

Can you make a similar guide comparing high-end GPUs?

Congratulations for your work.

Greetings from Colombia!!