Intel Core i9 (Gulftown) - 6 cores, 32 nm: hands-on review 

Intel Gulftown ES

The particular system we had the opportunity to test was a server version with default 3.07 GHz clock speeds and two QPI interconnects. The TURBO mode allowed two, three or four cores to be sped up by 133 MHz and one core by 266 MHz.

Intel Gulftown ES

Gulfotwn has more stabilizing capacitors on the underside than Bloomfield

Gulftown, left; Core i7-920, right

Gulftown, left; Core i7-920, right

Gulftown processors are backwards compatible with the LGA 1366 socket. The only thing you need to do to run them on today’s motherboards is a BIOS update. We have managed to get Gulftown to work on three boards: Gigabyte EX58-Extreme, ASUS Rampage II Gene and ASUS P6T SE. Unfortunately, early versions of BIOSes with Gulftown support have their problems too. All of the boards had only two memory multipliers available (× 8 and × 10, or DDR3-1066 and DDR3-1333) and one uncore multiplier (× 18). In addition, the memory subsystem bandwidth is lower than expected. Similar problems could be encountered prior to the premiere of the first Core i7. We expect that this will improve in subsequent BIOS versions.

CPU-Z recognized the processor correctly (click for details and other diagnostic programs)

The latest versions of popular diagnostic programs do not have any major difficulty identifying the processor model and features. HWiNFO32 even displayed the presence of AES-NI instructions: