The Core i7 870 - An Ancient Relic of History

So, a while ago, I found myself in a very awkward situation. I happened to be with a couple of my friends, when the question; "What PC do you use?" came up, and suddenly everyone was chatting about it. I heard shouts of "Ryzen 5", and "Core i5's", and names of GPU's that I'd have to sell part my body in order to obtain them. Eventually, my turn came up, and I very proudly said; "I got an Intel Core i7 870, with 32 gigs of DDR3 RAM, and GT 1030 2GB from Nvidia". All eyes were on me now. "A 870? I studied that during history class." one person went, "Err yes?" said, soon understanding the gravity of my old processor. 

Now I know what you may be thinking, what on Earth is a Core i7 870, and how exactly ancient is it. Well to answer your questions, the Core i7 870 was Intel's 2nd gen Core i7 processor, released in the 3rd quarter of 2009, with an MSRP of nearly $300. (However, you can get one of these CPU's for far less than that right now) Not exactly ancient, but in my books - a processor from 2009, that I am still currently using right now, in the year 2022; this processor seems just about ancient as the pyramids. 

(If you want to know more about this specific processor, I would recommend to check out Intel's official specifications for this processor, and UserBenchmark for more details.) 

In the face of newer gen Intel processors, and entry level AMD Ryzen processors, the Core i7 870 seems like an tiny streak of indivisible color on the spectrum of processors. It is utterly dwarfed in comparison with the high-end processors, obviously. But the 870 is an interesting build of a CPU.

I acquired a prebuilt Fujitsu Esprimo in 2018, and installed extra RAM, extra HDD and SSD space, and of course the now weak, GT 1030 2GB that ran fine during its early stages. Considering that the processor came out in 2009, and was discontinued according to Intel's websites, (but you can acquire used ones for around $50 dollars on Amazon) the processor in this pre-built PC would have been at least 5-7 years old. Now I didn't know this when I purchased it, thinking it was a decent rig that can run AAA games on low settings for decent FPS. I was partially right, and wrong. 

A Fujitsu Epsrimo

You see, the 870 has a base clock of 2.93 GHZ, and a boost clock of nearly 3.60 GHZ, considering newer gen CPU's have similar specs, this 870 was built on old Nahelem architecture, that is now obsolete - however, in aspects like gaming, the 870 faired decently well in the face of other processors, that were much more expensive. Games like Minecraft, which I played a fair bit of, ran at a solid 30 FPS, with a GT 1030, on this processor. I've played the game, Control a hit game that required something like a Intel Core i5 4690 in its minimum requirements, however I was able to play the game at a stable FPS, not a single drop or stutter due to lag, and I ran it at high settings. 

Additionally, I've even ran the game, Cities Skylines - a really high demanding game, especially with RAM - and it ran butter smooth on Ultra settings, with the base vanilla game. And this game requires a minimum CPU that is a fewer versions older than mine, a Core i7 930. Crazy right? Now I've scoured the internet far and wide, in search for answers - and I really did not find any.

But, soon enough - I started to see really big drops in frame rates, and slower loading times in various games. I checked to see what was being used up while games were loading, and it was the CPU - running at 100%, while things like the RAM were around half, with the exception of my GPU, that card is just inherently old and bad. (Sorry 1030) Soon enough, my CPU dipped like crazy in terms of performance, Cities Skylines load times were slightly longer (Even though I had fairly fast DDR3 RAM) and Minecraft worlds took ages to load, all while the frame rate dropped to the 10's. I ran the game Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and Control - and that too, ran much slower than before. Stuttering ever so more present, and FPS drops so frequent. And load times so slow, I could finish a million other things while a single save file loads. 

I checked whether Windows limited my CPU performance, by limiting the power usage, and a whole host of other stuff that tries to limit CPU performance. But even after I did that, it was still the same. Afterwards, I looked at the recent Windows updates, (I run Windows 10, not 11, still being decisive about that with my janky hardware) and recent Nvidia Driver updates, and nope - none of the documentation on that specified anything to do with this. Maybe it had something to do with the CPU overheating and stuff, but no - that can't be possible, as the highest I've seen it run was at around 60 degrees Celsius. (Although it has a very sketchy Chinese branded CPU cooler that came with the pre-built Esprimo) 

So I'll leave it there. If you are looking to buy a budget PC, there are a whole host of better options than my CPU, go for maybe a lower-tier Ryzen CPU, or maybe get a newer gen Core i3. Also, if you got any ideas and tips that can help resurrect my CPU, please do comment and it would tremendously help me and the co-owner of the blog (Who you'll be seeing more of later on)

PS: This is our first blog post, so any constructive criticism is welcome. If this happened to be the first blog post you read on our webpage, please do check our home page for more details! I do hope that this blog was informative to read, and please do recommend me stuff to talk about. I did very light research on this, as it was a topic that just came to my mind while looking at me dusty ol' PC. Take care and cheers!

- Vascal