Corsair Blog

The combination of the Intel® Core™ i7 Nehalem based Bloomfield processors and the X58 chipset has been quite a success. Intel has decided to build upon that success with a new offering of processors and a new chipset. Intel has just introduced the new Lynnfield class of CPUs which at this time includes the Intel Core i7 870 and 860 CPUs and the Intel Core™ i5 750 CPU. These CPUs share the same core architecture as the 9** series Core i7 CPUs but, they are coupled with a dual channel IMC as opposed to the triple channel controller on the 9** series. These CPUs have a different socket design with 1156 contacts as opposed to the 1366 contacts on the 9** series. They are designed to operate with the Intel P55 Express chipset. This means that Intel users can now harness the power of Core i7 in a more cost effective manner while not sacrificing performance. The new Lynnfield and P55 based systems are proving to be very powerful and feature rich based upon our testing. The system featured here proved itself to be an excellent system for all tasks put before it at the stock settings. And, the performance gets better as the system is also a very solid overclocking unit. With a minimum of tweaking we took our stock 2.8GHZ system to almost 4GHZ and saw some performance increases approaching 50%. Corsair has introduced several new memory kits designed specifically to work with the new platform. We are going to take a look at the Lynnfield Intel Core i7 860 CPU, and ASUS P7P55D Deluxe motherboard, and our new 8GB DDR3 memory kit, the Corsair Dominator CMD8GX3M4A1600C8. Read the full article here.