Intel Core i7 desktops dominate PC charts

Intel's new quad-core Core i7 processors were only launched in late November, but desktop systems featuring the CPUs - -from the likes of Dell, Falcon Northwest, Micro Express, and others -- have already made an impact on PC World's Top 10 charts.

As explained in "Getting to the Core of Intel's New Core i7 CPUs," these new processors are the company's first to be based on its long-previewed "Nehalem" architecture. The Core i7 family doesn't just mean new CPUs, they use a new chipset, a new system bus, and a new socket structure, Intel's first major technology jump since mid-2006, when Core 2 CPUs showed up on the scene.

[ Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

Mainstream desktops
Three of the six PCs to debut in our newly refreshed Top 10 Power Desktop chart boast Core i7. The Micro Express MicroFlex 92B (our Best Buy) and our fourth-ranked Dell Studio XPS use the midrange 2.93GHz Core i7 940 CPU, which costs about $580 on its own. Though both machines are competitively priced at less than $2,000 (without monitor), each returned performance results only just behind the fastest system we've seen in the category: Polywell's $3950 Poly X4800-Extreme (ranked fifth). That system's 3.2GHz X9770 processor, 4GB of speedy DDR3-1625 RAM, and two 10,000-rpm VelociRaptor hard drives (in a RAID 0 configuration) propelled it to a WorldBench 6 result of 141. By comparison, the Micro Express (3GB of DDR3-1333 RAM) and Dell (6GB of DDR3-1066 RAM) achieved WorldBench 6 performance scores of 138 and 136, respectively. Not too shabby at all. Polywell's newer, Core i7-equipped Poly X5800i desktop currently ranks eighth on our Power Desktop chart.