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 ESTUEFI Support: 3TB Drives & Mouse Support Pre-Boot
Remember the mountain of issues I had trying to get Seagate’s 3TB HDD to work as a boot drive in my X58 system? A couple of weeks ago Intel released version 10.1 of its storage drivers, which added software support for drives larger than 2.2TB. That’s one piece of the puzzle. With Sandy Bridge, many motherboard manufacturers are moving to UEFI instead of traditional 32-bit PC BIOSes. Combine that with a GPT partition and your new Sandy Bridge system should have no problems booting to and accessing 3TB drives made of a single partition.
ASUS' entire SNB lineup is UEFI enabled
ASUS sent over a couple of its 6-series motherboards which boast a custom skinned UEFI implementation. You get all of the functionality of a traditional BIOS but with a GUI, and yes, there’s full mouse support.
You’re either going to love or hate the new UEFI GUIs. They do take a little time to get used to but pretty much everything is where you’d expect it to be. Navigating with the mouse can be quicker than the keyboardin some situations and slower in others. Thankfully the interface, at least ASUS’, is pretty quick. There’s scroll wheel support although no draggable scroll bars, which makes quickly scrolling a little frustrating.
Unlike P55, you can set your SATA controller to compatible/legacy IDE mode. This is something you could do on X58 but not on P55. It’s useful for running HDDERASE to secure erase your SSD for example. If you do want to use HDDERASE on a 6-series motherboard you’ll need to first run HDDERASE4 to disable the UEFI initiated security on your drive and then run HDDERASE3 to secure erase it.
The biggest improvement to me honestly is POST time. Below is a quick comparison of time from power on to the Starting Windows screen. I’m using the exact same hardware in all three cases, just varying motherboard/CPU:
| Intel P67 | Intel P55 | Intel X58 | |
| Time from Power on to Boot Loader | 22.4 seconds | 29.4 seconds | 29.3 seconds |
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saikyan - Thursday, January 6, 2011 - link
"perhaps we should return to just labeling these things with their clock speeds and core counts? After all, it’s what Apple does—and that’s a company that still refuses to put more than one button on its mice. Maybe it’s worth a try."I hate to sound like the resident Mac fanboy (I'm platform agnostic) but I want to point out:
1. Apple sells by trim and display, they don't really make a big deal of the CPU (probably because they stick to low-end and midrange CPUs)
2. They have been shipping multi-button mice for nearly six years now. Come on!
vol7ron - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
- gtx460 image quality definitely the worst- 6870 image quality next
- quicksync/snb image quality are the best (marginally better than 6870); I did notice some color loss in the flowers behind the umbrella when I zoomed in on the quicksync picture, so I'd have to give SNB the title in terms of quality. QuickSync gets the title in terms of performance.
nitrousoxide - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link
lmaoBurticus - Monday, January 10, 2011 - link
My last Intel cpu was a prescott 2.4ghz P4 OC'd to over 3ghz... back in 2004? My last 3 main system builds all AMD.... I was thinking about going to an X6 in the near future, now I guess maybe not. My price point is pretty much $200 for the cpu + motherboard so maybe I'll have to wait a couple months.Suddenly my 2 year old Phenom II seems very, very slow...
magnusr - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - link
I just received my 2600K. It only had the normal fan. No special heatsink/fan for the 2600K. The same heatsink as the rest....This is a fraud since I placed my decision to take 2600K instead of the 2500K based on the better heatsink and the cache.
mmcnally - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - link
Same here.. Very disapointed as I would have purchased a better heatsink if I knew. I guess I'll just do the install with the standard crap HS and hold off on over-clocking until I get a better one.swing848 - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - link
Many of us are using older equipment. And, for those of us with limited funds it would have been nice if you would have added the Intel Q9650 and run all game benchmarks at 3.4GHz [ the speed of the 2600K], except for the default 3.6GHz speed of the X4 975BE, leave it there.I have a QX9650 that I purchased from eBay and it does 4GHz+ with ease, in a Gigabyte P35-DS3R motherboard, even with my ancient cooler [Thermalright XP-90] that I pulled from a socket 478 motherboard [$5 adapter].
Note: I lapped the XP-90 with a slight convex shape to better use with un-lapped CPUs.
In any event, a "quick and dirty" or simple overclock would have yielded at least some usable information. To save time, no need to try to get the maximum speed from all components.
As long as the CPUs were already overclocked, you could run all benchmarks at those speeds, not just games. Many of us overclock to get more for our money.
You included the ancient Q6600 at it's slow default speed - in some of the benchmarks. Why didn't you include it in all benchmarks?
Your normal benchmark page does not include a full, or nearly full, list of games and CPUs, so, comparisons are difficult to find, example here anandtech.com/bench/CPU/62
Where does this leave those of us with older equipment that is still chugging along?
Kell_sw - Thursday, January 13, 2011 - link
DRM inside the cpu? People is blind?. The sad thing, everybody is going to buy this.Sweeo - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I just bought a upgrade "kit" from an core 2 2.8 quad to i7 950 :(but I got 6 sata ports I noticed the new boards have 4+2
will the more advanced boards have more ?
Ahumado - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I didn't see it discussed. Did I miss it?