The Sandy Bridge Review: Intel Core i7-2600K, i5-2500K and Core i3-2100 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 3, 2011 12:01 AM ESTGeneral Performance: SYSMark 2007
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine. SYSMark 2007 ends up being more of a dual-core benchmark as the applications/workload show minimal use of more than two threads.
The 2600K is our new champion, the $317 chip is faster than Intel's Core i7 980X here as SYSMark 2007 doesn't really do much with the latter's extra 2 cores. Even the 2500K is a hair faster than the 980X. Compared to the Core i5 750, the upgrade is a no brainer - Sandy Bridge is around 20% faster at the same price point as Lynnfield.
Compared to Clarkdale, the Core i3 2100 only manages a 5% advantage howeer.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Once again, we have a new king - the 2600K is 9.7% faster than the 980X in our Photoshop CS4 test and the 2500K is just about equal to it. The Core i3 2100 does much better compared to the i3 540, outpacing it by around 30% and nearly equaling the performance of AMD's Phenom II X6 1100T.
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ac2 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Oh yes and another-bloody-socket-thank-you-so-much...Lets not forget that the only reason Intel can get away with all this is that AMD have been off their game for a while now..
Wonder if ARM will be the next one to give Intel the occasional kick it needs to be a bit more customer friendly...
Hrel - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
The HD5670 can be had for 65 bucks, so why include a 70 dollar 5570? illogical.Taft12 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
He's talking about the general online price across a variety of sites and OEMs (Sapphire, Asus, Palit, etc) not a one-off MIR-inclusive price that can be found only by the obsessive.kevith - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Man, this is awesome, my wallet is trying to hide, but it won't do it any good...I took the jump to AMD when Phenom II arrived, a friend of mine bought my C2D E7400 system, and already then I regretted when I was done building. There's no two ways about it, Intel systems - if they aren't the absolute low-end - runs so much smoother.
Which seems to be the case again, even at a reasonable price.
There's one thing about the review I don't really understand: "...Another Anandtech editor put it this way: You get the same performance at a lower price..."
Has he read the review?
As far as I can see, you get pretty much more performance at a lower price.
xsilver - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Is there going to be a memory scaling test for sandy bridge?eg. how much of a performance gap with ddr1333 ram vs ddr2000
also does sandy bridge's gpu allow for multi monitor setups? what about when stacked with a discrete gpu?
RicowSQL - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Hey guys, two things i'm missing from the SB reviews over the web:1) How well does the new IMC scales to memory clocks? I guess it's a matter of time until someone performs a in-depth analysis on that matter, but i'm particularly interested on that...
2) Adobe's Flash decoding can take advantage of Intel IGPs acceleration through Clear Video technology. Will it work in the new HD2000/3000 series as well?
ibudic1 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
But Why not VS 2010?Taft12 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Same reason it takes a while for AT to provide comparisons of the latest games - it takes an eternity to run a benchmark on all CPUs going back a couple generations.Taft12 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
I think this might be an error in your chart -- the last one on page 3 shows a Y for the i3-2100 in the AES-NI column. I would love to have this feature on an i3 CPU, but the following paragraph states "Intel also uses AES-NI as a reason to force users away from the i3 and towards the i5" which leads me to believe that i3 doesn't have said feature.Please let me know if I'm wrong so I can get my pre-order in!!!
nedjinski - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Please comment on the Sandy Bridge / DRM 'controversy'.Thanks.