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Just came back from the launch of Intel Core i7 at Equinox, Swissotel The Stamford. This is the second time I have been to Equinox, the first time was attending OCBC Chinese New Year dinner with my mom.

Equinox is located at the 70th floor of Swissotel The Stamford and you can expect the view to be fantastic.

The place is pretty small, there were about 10 PCs setup with games running on the Core i7 and it doesn’t lag! Maybe because some of the gaming rig are using Nvidia SLI/ ATI CrossFire graphics card. There is also a demo by an Australian Overclocker which uses liquid nitrogen (he literally brought the whole tank of liquid nitrogen) to overclock the Core i7. He did not show us what clock speed is it running but rather the temperature of the CPU which is about 4deg;

I am very expressed by the speed of the processor, there is a demo between a Core 2 Quad and Core i7 processor base on 3D rendering and video encoding, and the results are impressive. I love the hyper-threading (HT) on the Core i7 which makes your OS recognize it as 8 cores instead of just 4, similar to the technology used in Pentium 4 half a decade ago.

There are 3 flavors of the Core i7 available, Core i7-920 running at 2.66GHz, Core i7-940 running at 2.93GHz and Core i7-965 XE running at 3.2Ghz. It is available in Sim Lim Square as of today, they started shipping it 2 weeks ago to retailers at Sim Lim Square but they only can start selling from today onwards.

Prices wise, it is pretty steep, ranging from S$919 to S$2,176 with motherboard bundle and not forgetting it only support DDR3 RAM (which is expensive now) if I am not wrong.

You might want to wait till next year for the price to drop before upgrading your computer. It suddenly makes my Core 2 Quad Q9450 very outdated. But I think the next time I change my computer (5 years later in 2013), it should have at least 16 cores and with HT, it will become 32 cores.

Wilfrid if you are reading this, thanks for the dinner treat =D