When looking at a new CPU and motherboard combination, there's always a wonder how it performs in the real world. Sysmark 2007 benchmark of a real-world suite of benchmarks including Office, Vegas and is a decent test of the every-day applications that most end-users will use besides games which are usually the most intensive of the benchmarks. The Core i7 920 scores higher than 200 on this benchmark, which has it beating the QX9770 by a good margin.
When applications support multi-cores the Core i7 really shines. 3DMark Vantage shows the CPU to score over 19000 points on the CPU portion of the test compared to about 13000 on the QX9770 CPU. While these tests are synthetic benchmarks, this is the best way to show performance differential. Running wPrime with 8 threads indicated a time of 279.098 seconds on the 1024mb stability test. The same test on the QX9770 ran about 385 seconds, meaning this CPU is a good deal faster in this one application where multi-threading does work.
Gaming on the Intel Core i7 series depends on the application and again whether multiple cores are supported. In the vast majority of games the performance difference between using the Core 2 QX9770 or the Core i7 965 is slight enough to be considered graphics card bound rather than CPU bound. There are a couple of instances where the 965 is noticeably faster and others where it is too close to call.
