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[Commence writing 980X Gulftown review] [#6876584] - generate specifications - copy/paste marketing slides - set stock frequencies, run benchmark - overclock slightly, run benchmark - mention price - conclusion: best performance, highest price.

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[Commence writing Gulftown review] [#6876584] - ...

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Surely, laying my hands on the latest CPU architecture, knowing it comes at a retail price of €1000 and it's in fact just the best a (desktop)-man can get, is exciting, but sometimes I forget that I'm not the only one testing this product. No, there are thousands of people all around the globe having the exact same feeling ... and willing to do the exact same type of article. The question is: does it matter whether I produce yet another run-of-the-mill Gulftown review or can I provide our readers with some information that other reviews don’t have and present it in a creative manner. Well, in this case I decided to go for the latter.

However, before we continue this madness, allow me to go over the Gulftown basics just one more time. For those who crave for performance, just like me, this new Intel product is interesting for two simple reasons:

It has SIX cores and hyper threading

build with 32nm process, not 45nm

Judging from the overclocking results obtained with the Intel Clarkdale architecture, which was the first 32nm variant of the Intel Core series, that last argument basically comes down to: better overclockability than what we were used to from the Bloomfield samples. I'm sure everyone knows what I am talking about here: the 45nm Bloomfield series hardly scaled with lower temperatures and hardly scaled with increased voltage and with those two being the main tools of an extreme overclocker, I suppose you can already see that these CPUs were not an overclocker's dream. Luck of the draw mainly, although obtaining a high-end mainboard did help to get slightly higher results.

The first argument needs no explanation: the more cores we have, the better we can see multi-threaded benchmarks, such as 3DMark Vantage or Wprime, scale.