So how would a 2.8GHz i7 perform in PCSX2?

[bkwegoharder]

Yeah I did notice slow downs in GTA Vice City Stories, I would have to up the speed hacks and lower the resolution somewhat, but I still get slowdowns in certain areas. For the most part it is fullspeed now seeing how the emulator advanced. It slows down only in a few spots.

[DarkDante]

I don't know if an i7 can perform better than a c2d at GSdx hardware mode,but definetelly in GSdx software mode an i7 dominates a c2d.

[Thrive]

Overclocking of i7 is not trivial task: by overcloking you superseded turbo bust function. And even more, you could obtain nominal 4HHz, that would be throttled back in real task to 3HHz. i7 920 is not very good choice.

Wow, no.

First of all, overclocking the i7 920 is, contrary to what you claim, pretty trivial..so long as you've done your homework (as it's certainly a bit different coming from overclocking with the Core 2 line.) Depending on the batch, one can usually reach 3.8GHz-4.0GHz with very little voltage tweaking (particularly with the help of guidelines one can find online) on air (and even beyond 4GHz, with a D0.)

Second, I don't think you even know what Turbo Mode does. All it does is dynamically kick up the multiplier for a single core (slightly) when under load. At stock BIOS settings, a single core of the i7 920 dynamically goes from 2.66GHz (20x mult) at idle to ~2.8GHz (21x mult) under load. Turbo Mode is also something that's usually disabled when overclocked..so it's also pretty irrelevant to the overclocking discussion anyway.

I don't know if an i7 can perform better than a c2d at GSdx hardware mode,but definetelly in GSdx software mode an i7 dominates a c2d.

In GSdx hardware mode, given a sufficient video card & proper plugin settings (so that the performance bottleneck is indeed on the processor), an i7 should always be outperforming a Core 2 chip in PCSX2 if both processors are at similar clock speeds (in theory, and, as an owner of both an i7 920 and Core 2 Q6600 setup, I've tested and confirmed this myself.)

The i7 architecture is capable of performing more work per clock cycle than the Core 2 architecture. With PCSX2 being extremely CPU-reliant (made very obvious if you've done any overclocking before/after performance comparisons with the application), it's only natural that using an i7 (even at the same clock speed) would result in better performance.

[whiteclad57]

If you have i7 buy a nVidia 285 and switch GsdX to SSE4.1/hardware mode for full speed emulation in most titles