When the source is “Willy Deeplung” you have to have reservations, but this is very interesting nonetheless. Hexus tells us that Nehalem gaming is nothing special, and given the current GPU-limited nature of gaming this should not surprise you. Where this will truly shake out is in Q4 as we have a LOT of new games scheduled to come out, many with heavier physics than we have seen before. So let’s not write Nehalem gaming off quite yet.

Nehalem won't matter much if you play games that are limited by the graphics subsystem, usually at higher resolutions and image-quality settings, but it's always nice to have extra power under the hood, we suppose.

On the applications side of the coin things look very bright in terms of content creation and with video encoding but it will still be interesting to see how far GPU video encoding comes this year.

Looking back through the numbers, the 2.93GHz Nehalem naturally comes into its own when the cores, be they physical or virtual, are pushed by the software. When this happens, it's up to 33 per cent faster than a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770, and some 50 per cent quicker than an equivalently-clocked (Kentsfield-based) Core 2 Quad CPU.

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