Thanks for this video! I ran an i5-650 then later swapped it out for an i7-870. Doubling the cores was a big upgrade for me, although it needed an overclock just to keep up with a GTX 970. It was a terrific chip at the time, although the next upgrade to an i7-5820k felt massive!
Tested the i5 750 recently, for a 14 year old CPU it holds up remarkably well in modern titles, intel CPUs really age quite well :) The 1156 socket really was a entry point into the modern era of CPUs for intel I believe, as shown with the power they have and the overall innovations the brought (DDR3 RAM, SATA 3 etc....)
@@suiken3149 true, I know that, but since LGA 1156 they went exclusively with DDR3 and started supported higher speeds, from what I have seen mmany 775 boards were limited to pretty basic 1333 or even 1066mhz DDR3, with the max limit being 8GB, LGA 1156 expanded with higher speeds and I believe max of 16GB
First gen can still keep up in some cases but it really starts to show its age as it is missing quite a lot of features like pcie gen 3 usb 3(there where a few boards that supported it) Sata 3 (same with usb3) Avx instructions set Nowadays there are games that just don't launch on 1st gen systems due to the lack of avx. That is very sad in my opinion.
AVX uses mostly for DRM in modern games. It can run most of games in 60FPS 1080P. It's great achievement for cpu that was release in a decade ago. Sandy bridge don't have Pci-E 3.0 too.
Thats the chip i currently use in my optiplex 980... runs Fortnite at 60fps on medium rather well... with an AMD rx550, it does the job nicely. upgraded to usb 3 ports and soon 16g ram (sitting at 12 now)... SSD was installed last year to boot up super fast.. love it
The losses in some overclocked cases are puzzling, maybe there are latencies from the particular clock frequencies not synchronizing well. maybe 200 BCLK / 21 mult would be smoother, though only 4.2Ghz instead of 4.3
I play older games @ 720p with a second gen i7 (2600) to this day, it's faster than an i5 6400, which is insane tbh, that happened because intel had no competition, the amd fx series was a big flop, so intel didn't see the need to innovate anymore! Great to see that an old beast like this can still be useful in 2023! I paired my i7 with a GT 1030, i use a 1280 x 1024 monitor, i disabled scaling and play all my games at 720p, which gives it a sharp image and a GT 1030 is a nice graphics card, and it sips power, and it is almost as powerful as a gtx 570, which is nice to have!
does your 1030 have dvi or vga? i recommend using a crt monitor as they are free and if not very cheap usually. i have an old nvidia XFX vga to dvi adapter i use for my gtx 1050 and gts 250. On most of my crts i can get at least 85hz but my dell gets 100hz at 800x600 which is nice for older games.
@@limpa756 Maybe your not to into the pc space and thats okay. But everytime i look on craiglist i literally get a new crt for free or i pay 5-10 USD. I already got 5 of them stacked up. If your buying on ebay than obviously you would have to pay shipping which is expensive.
@@csgosniperelitepro My gt 1030 only has hdmi and displayport, it is an asus card, and i use a dvi to hdmi adapter on a dell monitor, getting a crt with dvi is pretty rare and quite expensive, good crt monitors are honestly not that cheap anymore, 5 to 10 years ago, they were cheap, heck, people were throwing them away! But now? I own a crt monitor, but it is vga only, like 90 percent of all crt monitors made. I'm happy with my dell monitor, it's a 17 inch one and the image is nice and sharp, it's a high quality monitor btw.
I just bought a 3rd gen i7 for my dad's 1156 office computer. His 3rd gen i3 was struggling a bit, also upgraded his 4gb ram to 8gb ram ddr3 1333mhz. It's fun upgrading such an old platform and seeing improved results.
I have one of these bad boys running a modern Linux distro. Mainly just used for occasional internet browsing stuff and data storage. Although I'm really surprised how capable it still is today.
Cool video I still use a Thinkpad X201T with a first generation i7 640 Mobile cpu. Never tried the desktop version. My first desktop in the line was an i5 2500. Went from there to a Xeon to my current i5 8400.
We are exiting the 6 core 12 thread era and entering the 8 core 16 thread era as I type this. I noticed most enthusiasts without budgetary constraint choose 8 core 16 thread processors like the 5800X3D, 7800X3D, i7 13700k and i9 13900k. They all have 8 cores and 16 threads (P cores in Intel nomenclature). They give the best bang for the buck in more and more games as time goes on. Pretty impressive that Nehalem still has legs in both the gaming space and the server space.
"many blue screens later" haha, I had a 920 at the time and I remember doing a lot of overclocking and experienced a lot of blue screens while dialing that thing in.
I'm still using it: runs all at 1080p Med/high settings. i7 870 XMP profile 212 Evo cooling. 16GB DDR3 1600 Asus Strix 1060 6GB OC Asus P7P55D- E LX SSD Kingston SATA 3 512GB 750w Power Supply 80+ cert 43' TV LG Full HD :D
I have had first gen i7's but only on X58/LGA1366. i7-920 and 2x i7-950, though two of them are actually the Xeon versions W3520 and W3550. I upgraded my main PC to a 6c/12t X5670 in 2016
I am currently running this platform on my living room with P55-UD4 and X3470 OC to 4.2Ghz 1.4v pairing with a mere HD7790 1GB but it Runs Skyrim like a champ. I might try OC it again later after watching this video and try getting 4.3Ghz with 1.45v and see if its stable or not...if it isn't then I'll drop back to 4.25Ghz and see if its okay. Thanks for sharing this video.
Nice review. But please make the charts more readable. Black on grey is not a good choice, especially with that circular thing animating in the background.
Oddly enough I have this same board and chip. Im going to try and slow down the playback and follow your overclocking method. Thanks for making this available.
I have the i7-950, basically same as that your using but mines on a socket 1366 and with triple-channel memory, and having 3 sticks of 2gig ddr3 1066 dimms for a total of 6gig ram. Would having an extra channel have any benefit over the dual channel 1156 cpus? I can see u listed a triple-channel 6-core cpu the 990x! Ive been thinking of upgrading my cpu to the 970(6-core). Having looking at specs, running single core the 870 can clock a bit higher than mine using turboboost, but running multiple cores they would run at stock speeds(?) and have different results?
When the whole Core series launched, I had just bought a late era Core Two Duo iMac - missing the late 2009 generation by a hair, which - even for Macs - was a major uplift in performance. I wouldn't upgrade again for a few years, which, looking back, was probably the reason why my reintroduction into 'modern' gaming was Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition and a lot of emulators, LOL. Over the years, I've tinkered with a lot of outdated Macs - which, as a former Mac guy - I seem to have no problem in finding low cost or free ones (I liked the OS, and the stability of hardware - but... shit... I like building my own or tweaking with Linux now, sigh... Glutton for punishment to the end). In this regard, the switch from the Duo to the i-series Core chips were really, really important... Though looking back, it was the dual processor Xeon systems that kicked everything else to the curb. Even the 2006 cheesegrater still packs a punch, and I used it as a secondary gaming box for awhile (err, probably tertiary - I had a 2010 running, nearly maxxed out too). In short, Intel rested on the laurels of this launch for a very long time in a way - and the accompanying Xeon chips were equally hard to touch. I can only imagine what they did for PCs of the era (I now focus on later PC systems or much earlier ones since I started tinkering - save for Xeons... I love Xeons).
If you don't have too high demands on a high frame rate beyond 60 FPS, you can still play well with this CPU. It has held up really well despite its age. I still have an 870 Retro PC with GeForce Titan 6 GB.
This really wasn't a Gen 1 i7. The i7-870 and i7-875K were more akin to a midway point between the Gen 1 900 series and the soon to come 2nd Gen Sandy Bridge line. They were on the 40nm of the 900 series but had features of Sandy Bridge. The most notable being the unlocked multiplier on the i7-875K. This was the first CPU from Intel to have this feature. They also used a different socket from the Gen 1 900 series. I used an i7-875K for years and was able to clock it to over 4ghz. I still have the CPU in a system and it still runs older titles like a champ.
So, if we round it up, if you framecap your games to 60 fps. You can still play 9 out of 10 modern games with a 14 year CPU. I had the same mobo as in this video, but with a i5 750 i bought in 2009 iirc. To this day i regret that i had not waited to save up some more money to buy an i7, as Battlefield 3 was loving 8 threads especially on the 64 players maps.
Doing these tests without providing power usage at the end of the video is basically a waste of time, would of been nice to know how much more power was used with the overclock, please take note of this for future videos...
Watching this on a i5-750.
I have been using it since the beginning of 2010!
Thanks for this video! I ran an i5-650 then later swapped it out for an i7-870. Doubling the cores was a big upgrade for me, although it needed an overclock just to keep up with a GTX 970. It was a terrific chip at the time, although the next upgrade to an i7-5820k felt massive!
Tested the i5 750 recently, for a 14 year old CPU it holds up remarkably well in modern titles, intel CPUs really age quite well :)
The 1156 socket really was a entry point into the modern era of CPUs for intel I believe, as shown with the power they have and the overall innovations the brought (DDR3 RAM, SATA 3 etc....)
I'm surprised mine still boots. Haha
Intel started using DDR3 RAM since LGA 775 with Core 2 CPUs
@@suiken3149 true, I know that, but since LGA 1156 they went exclusively with DDR3 and started supported higher speeds, from what I have seen mmany 775 boards were limited to pretty basic 1333 or even 1066mhz DDR3, with the max limit being 8GB, LGA 1156 expanded with higher speeds and I believe max of 16GB
Phenom II X6: Hold my beer...
has 8 mb L Casch
First gen can still keep up in some cases but it really starts to show its age as it is missing quite a lot of features like
pcie gen 3
usb 3(there where a few boards that supported it)
Sata 3 (same with usb3)
Avx instructions set
Nowadays there are games that just don't launch on 1st gen systems due to the lack of avx. That is very sad in my opinion.
AVX uses mostly for DRM in modern games. It can run most of games in 60FPS 1080P. It's great achievement for cpu that was release in a decade ago. Sandy bridge don't have Pci-E 3.0 too.
Thats the chip i currently use in my optiplex 980... runs Fortnite at 60fps on medium rather well... with an AMD rx550, it does the job nicely. upgraded to usb 3 ports and soon 16g ram (sitting at 12 now)... SSD was installed last year to boot up super fast.. love it
You can upgrade for something like gtx 1050 ti and you can play lots of games
With that same chip and graphics card you use, you think it would be good enough to run Gta RP on it?
maybe... for instance, i was able to play Miles Morales on low settings and it was pretty decent. Like very playable.... 35-45 FPS @@ghettogamersnyc
I have one of these chips running my media server. It's been a flawless setup, very happy with it.
i still have a pc with a i7 870 ES paired with a GTX 970, and 8gb of 1600 ram
i used to play overwatch on that setup. it was an amazing i7.
You can run Windows XP for games on this. I used the same for games with EAX supports.
The losses in some overclocked cases are puzzling, maybe there are latencies from the particular clock frequencies not synchronizing well. maybe 200 BCLK / 21 mult would be smoother, though only 4.2Ghz instead of 4.3
yeah that must be some bug
nice. would be good if u can include some fx chips or phenom ii when you do the sandy bridge video
And preferably both Bulldozer and Piledriver
What irony. I just got one of these yesterday. It's been forever since I took one for a drive too...Now I get to watch you do it first. Nice.
I play older games @ 720p with a second gen i7 (2600) to this day, it's faster than an i5 6400, which is insane tbh, that happened because intel had no competition, the amd fx series was a big flop, so intel didn't see the need to innovate anymore! Great to see that an old beast like this can still be useful in 2023! I paired my i7 with a GT 1030, i use a 1280 x 1024 monitor, i disabled scaling and play all my games at 720p, which gives it a sharp image and a GT 1030 is a nice graphics card, and it sips power, and it is almost as powerful as a gtx 570, which is nice to have!
I have a 2500K @ 5GHz on my media PC, still runs even newer games somewhat fine at 1080p. Paired with a R9 290X.
does your 1030 have dvi or vga? i recommend using a crt monitor as they are free and if not very cheap usually. i have an old nvidia XFX vga to dvi adapter i use for my gtx 1050 and gts 250. On most of my crts i can get at least 85hz but my dell gets 100hz at 800x600 which is nice for older games.
What on earth, good crt monitors are far from cheap
@@limpa756 Maybe your not to into the pc space and thats okay. But everytime i look on craiglist i literally get a new crt for free or i pay 5-10 USD. I already got 5 of them stacked up. If your buying on ebay than obviously you would have to pay shipping which is expensive.
@@csgosniperelitepro My gt 1030 only has hdmi and displayport, it is an asus card, and i use a dvi to hdmi adapter on a dell monitor, getting a crt with dvi is pretty rare and quite expensive, good crt monitors are honestly not that cheap anymore, 5 to 10 years ago, they were cheap, heck, people were throwing them away! But now? I own a crt monitor, but it is vga only, like 90 percent of all crt monitors made. I'm happy with my dell monitor, it's a 17 inch one and the image is nice and sharp, it's a high quality monitor btw.
I just bought a 3rd gen i7 for my dad's 1156 office computer. His 3rd gen i3 was struggling a bit, also upgraded his 4gb ram to 8gb ram ddr3 1333mhz. It's fun upgrading such an old platform and seeing improved results.
I use i7 3770 every day with 16gb ram and SLI video cards. I dont play latest games but for everyday use its very quick and useful.
I have one of these bad boys running a modern Linux distro. Mainly just used for occasional internet browsing stuff and data storage. Although I'm really surprised how capable it still is today.
Cool video I still use a Thinkpad X201T with a first generation i7 640 Mobile cpu. Never tried the desktop version. My first desktop in the line was an i5 2500. Went from there to a Xeon to my current i5 8400.
We are exiting the 6 core 12 thread era and entering the 8 core 16 thread era as I type this. I noticed most enthusiasts without budgetary constraint choose 8 core 16 thread processors like the 5800X3D, 7800X3D, i7 13700k and i9 13900k. They all have 8 cores and 16 threads (P cores in Intel nomenclature). They give the best bang for the buck in more and more games as time goes on. Pretty impressive that Nehalem still has legs in both the gaming space and the server space.
"many blue screens later"
haha, I had a 920 at the time and I remember doing a lot of overclocking and experienced a lot of blue screens while dialing that thing in.
I'm still using it: runs all at 1080p Med/high settings.
i7 870 XMP profile 212 Evo cooling.
16GB DDR3 1600
Asus Strix 1060 6GB OC
Asus P7P55D- E LX
SSD Kingston SATA 3 512GB
750w Power Supply 80+ cert
43' TV LG Full HD :D
Would love to see benchmarks of this CPU with classic doom, quake. And some newer, not that old titles like titanfall. Still pretty impressive!
I have i7 870 with 8gb ram and 2gb grafic card in my old PC and im quite satisfied with it.
I have had first gen i7's but only on X58/LGA1366. i7-920 and 2x i7-950, though two of them are actually the Xeon versions W3520 and W3550. I upgraded my main PC to a 6c/12t X5670 in 2016
My Core i7 870 has literally been in constant almost 24 x 7 x 365 use since 2010! Has never failed me once. Not even a single blue screen - ever.
I am currently running this platform on my living room with P55-UD4 and X3470 OC to 4.2Ghz 1.4v pairing with a mere HD7790 1GB but it Runs Skyrim like a champ. I might try OC it again later after watching this video and try getting 4.3Ghz with 1.45v and see if its stable or not...if it isn't then I'll drop back to 4.25Ghz and see if its okay. Thanks for sharing this video.
I had the Intel i-7 975, worked great. Next is the 4790K, which I am still using.
Nice review. But please make the charts more readable. Black on grey is not a good choice, especially with that circular thing animating in the background.
I have an i7 870 in my 2010 iMac (plus 16 GB RAM and an SSD) and I use it daily for watching YT videos and writing.
Love the 1st gen i7s plus you can overclock then out the box even with a budget board 👌
If you delid it on a liquid metal.
Oddly enough I have this same board and chip. Im going to try and slow down the playback and follow your overclocking method.
Thanks for making this available.
I have the i7-950, basically same as that your using but mines on a socket 1366 and with triple-channel memory, and having 3 sticks of 2gig ddr3 1066 dimms for a total of 6gig ram. Would having an extra channel have any benefit over the dual channel 1156 cpus? I can see u listed a triple-channel 6-core cpu the 990x!
Ive been thinking of upgrading my cpu to the 970(6-core).
Having looking at specs, running single core the 870 can clock a bit higher than mine using turboboost, but running multiple cores they would run at stock speeds(?) and have different results?
I have this processor in my dell optiplex 980 that originally had an i5 750. It's a great cpu to upgrade an older computer with.
When the whole Core series launched, I had just bought a late era Core Two Duo iMac - missing the late 2009 generation by a hair, which - even for Macs - was a major uplift in performance. I wouldn't upgrade again for a few years, which, looking back, was probably the reason why my reintroduction into 'modern' gaming was Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition and a lot of emulators, LOL.
Over the years, I've tinkered with a lot of outdated Macs - which, as a former Mac guy - I seem to have no problem in finding low cost or free ones (I liked the OS, and the stability of hardware - but... shit... I like building my own or tweaking with Linux now, sigh... Glutton for punishment to the end). In this regard, the switch from the Duo to the i-series Core chips were really, really important...
Though looking back, it was the dual processor Xeon systems that kicked everything else to the curb. Even the 2006 cheesegrater still packs a punch, and I used it as a secondary gaming box for awhile (err, probably tertiary - I had a 2010 running, nearly maxxed out too).
In short, Intel rested on the laurels of this launch for a very long time in a way - and the accompanying Xeon chips were equally hard to touch. I can only imagine what they did for PCs of the era (I now focus on later PC systems or much earlier ones since I started tinkering - save for Xeons... I love Xeons).
If you don't have too high demands on a high frame rate beyond 60 FPS, you can still play well with this CPU. It has held up really well despite its age. I still have an 870 Retro PC with GeForce Titan 6 GB.
Damn, is my i7-920 already 14 years old??? ….
It will be 15 years old in November
I7 3770K use it even today.. ;-)
This really wasn't a Gen 1 i7. The i7-870 and i7-875K were more akin to a midway point between the Gen 1 900 series and the soon to come 2nd Gen Sandy Bridge line. They were on the 40nm of the 900 series but had features of Sandy Bridge. The most notable being the unlocked multiplier on the i7-875K. This was the first CPU from Intel to have this feature. They also used a different socket from the Gen 1 900 series. I used an i7-875K for years and was able to clock it to over 4ghz. I still have the CPU in a system and it still runs older titles like a champ.
Lol the 875k was not the first CPU with unlocked multi at all. There was a Pentium 6600k way before that.
Nice motherboard, I got similar, with X3470...
So, if we round it up, if you framecap your games to 60 fps. You can still play 9 out of 10 modern games with a 14 year CPU. I had the same mobo as in this video, but with a i5 750 i bought in 2009 iirc. To this day i regret that i had not waited to save up some more money to buy an i7, as Battlefield 3 was loving 8 threads especially on the 64 players maps.
At 4300 is it really drawing around 270 watts ? Then, why do people complain about the i9 13900k ?
Maybe the whole system power consumption from the wall under full CPU load but definitely not the CPU alone
Ah man the Lynnfield chips could so 4GHz on air cooling easily.
Can core i7 870 support 32gb ram ddr3 buss 1600 ?
i have this same board but is dead and xeon 3440
Never had a Lynnfield platform. The only 1156 setup I've had was an OEM board with an i3-530, built it as a Sims3 rig for my ex back in the day. :D
Finally :)
Doing these tests without providing power usage at the end of the video is basically a waste of time, would of been nice to know how much more power was used with the overclock, please take note of this for future videos...
who here thanks to Bryant and O’Halloran, 2ed.?
The 870 was a pretty punchy CPU at the time, if you look at original reviews it could keep up with the mid X58 chips quite well.
me watch this video with my i5 gen 1 ~
🤣🤣
50+ fps in cyberpunk means it can play pretty much everything . also an x3450 is dirt cheap
I would like to see a uno-reverse maximul undervolt and minimum clockspeed version of many CPUs 🤓
Holy, the electric bill will be huge... The performace boost, in my eyes, isn´t worth it...
i7 870 and Rx580... bottleneck or not
Slap some x5675/x5690 in it 😅
I3 2120
hate to say it but first