The i7 processors are overclocking to amazing speeds and this little beauty is reportedly doing 3.8Ghz on aircooling with ease. Nehalem is a radically new design for Intel. The CPU is a 'native' quad-core CPU, where all four cores sit on the same piece of silicon. With its Core 2 CPUs, Intel used two dual-Core dies to create a quad-core chip, this translates into better performance. 

Intel has also integrated the memory controller onto the Nehalem CPU die rather than having it be part of the Northbridge on the motherboard. It's achieved this by modularising the design of the CPU. The seperate processing cores and caches are linked to the onboard memory controller via a new bus standard called QuickPath (sometimes called QPI, short for QuickPath Interconnect). As QuickPath replaces the Frontside Bus (FSB) and Northbridge combo, it also takes over the role of allowing the CPU to connect to other system components, busses and controllers such as the PCI Express controller and DDR3 memory. The last big news about Nehalem is that it uses Hyper-Threading. This technology works just as it did with the Pentium 4, using spare resources of a processing core to try to execute a second process thread. This means that a quad-core Nehalem processor can accept and attempt to process eight threads simultaneously, making it even more massively parallel than the current Core 2 Quad CPUs.

- Lithography Process: 45 nm
- Cores: 4
- Threads: 8
- Frequency: 2.66 GHz
- Cache: 256 KB L2/core and 8 MB shared L3
- Memory Controller: Triple channel DDR3 800/1066/1333 MHz
- Bus Interface: 1x 4.8 GT/s QuickPath
- TDP: 130W - Socket: LGA1366

Grab one from overclockers UK for a special offer price of £250 inc vat.