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 ESTThe 6-series Platform
At launch Intel is offering two chipset families for Sandy Bridge: P-series and H-series, just like with Lynnfield. The high level differentiation is easy to understand: P-series doesn’t support processor graphics, H-series does.
There are other differences as well. The P67 chipset supports 2x8 CrossFire and SLI while H67 only supports a single x16 slot off of the SNB CPU (the chip has 16 PCIe 2.0 lanes that stem from it).
While H67 allows for memory and graphics overclocking, it doesn’t support any amount of processor overclocking. If you want to overclock your Sandy Bridge, you need a P67 motherboard.
6Gbps
Had SSDs not arrived when they did, I wouldn’t have cared about faster SATA speeds. That’s how it worked after all in the evolution of the hard drive. We’d get a faster ATA or SATA protocol, and nothing would really change. Sure we’d eventually get a drive that could take advantage of more bandwidth, but it was a sluggish evolution that just wasn’t exciting.
SSDs definitely changed all of that. Today there’s only a single 6Gbps consumer SSD on the market—Crucial’s RealSSD C300. By the middle of the year we’ll have at least two more high-end offerings, including SandForce’s SF-2000. All of these SSDs will be able to fully saturate a 3Gbps SATA interface in real world scenarios.
Intel's DP67BG—The blue SATA ports on the right are 6Gbps, the black ones are 3Gbps
To meet the soon to be growing need for 6Gbps SATA ports Intel outfits the 6-series PCH with two 6Gbps SATA ports in addition to its four 3Gbps SATA ports.
I dusted off my 128GB RealSSD C300 and ran it through a bunch of tests on five different platforms: Intel’s X58 (3Gbps), Intel’s P67 (3Gbps and 6Gbps), AMD’s 890GX (6Gbps) and Intel’s X58 with a Marvell 9128 6Gbps SATA controller. The Marvell 91xx controller is what you’ll find on most 5-series motherboards with 6Gbps SATA support.
I ran sequential read/write and random read/write tests, at a queue depth of 32 to really stress the limits of each chipset’s SATA protocol implementation. I ran the sequential tests for a minute straight and the random tests for three minutes. I tested a multitude of block sizes ranging from 512-bytes all the way up to 32KB. All transfers were 4KB aligned to simulate access in a modern OS. Each benchmark started at LBA 0 and was allowed to use the entire LBA space for accesses. The SSD was TRIMed between runs involving writes.
Among Intel chipsets I found that the X58 has stellar 3Gbps SATA performance, which is why I standardize on it for my SSD testbed. Even compared to the new 6-series platform there are slight advantages at high queue depths to the X58 vs. Intel’s latest chipsets.
Looking at 6Gbps performance though there’s no comparison, the X58 is dated in this respect. Thankfully all of the contenders do well in our 6Gbps tests. AMD’s 8-series platform is a bit faster at certain block sizes but for the most part it, Intel’s 6-series and Marvell’s 91xx controllers perform identically.
I hate to be a bore but when it comes to SATA controllers an uneventful experience is probably the best you can hope for.
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IanWorthington - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Not really: the board manufacturers seem to be adding usb3 chipsets w/o real problems. Good enough.usernamehere - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Sure, if you're building a desktop you can find plenty with USB 3.0 support (via NEC). But if you're looking for a laptop, most will still not have it. For the fact that manufacturers don't want to have to pay extra for features, when they usually get features via the chipsets already included. Asus is coming out with a handful of notebooks in 2011 with USB 3.0 (that I know of), but wide-spread adoption will not be here this year.JarredWalton - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Most decent laptops will have USB3. ASUS, Dell, HP, Clevo, and Compal have all used the NEC chip (and probably others as well). Low-end laptops won't get USB3, but then low-end laptops don't get a lot of things.TekDemon - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Even the netbooks usually have USB 3.0 these days and those almost all use intel atom CPUs. The cost to add the controller is negligible for large manufacturers. USB is not going to be the deciding factor for purchases.DanNeely - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Are you sure about that? Newegg lists 99 netbooks on their site. Searching for USB 3 within netbooks returns 0 products.TekDemon - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Your claims are pretty silly seeing as how USB came about in the same way that Light Peak did-Intel invented USB and pushed it to legacy ports like PS/2, and slowly phased out support for the older ones entirely over the years. It makes no sense for them to support USB 3.0, especially without a real market of devices.But motherboard manufacturers will support USB 3.0 via add-in chips. I don't see how this anti-competitive at all, why should intel have to support a format it doesn't think makes sense? So far USB 3.0 hasn't really shown speeds close to it's theoretical, and the only devices that really need the higher bandwidth are external drives that are better off being run off E-SATA anyways. There's no real "killer app" for USB 3.0 yet.
BTW Light Peak will easily support adding power to devices, so it definitely does not need USB in order to provide power. There'll just be two wires running alongside the fiber optics.
DanNeely - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
The eSata + USB (power) connector has never gone anywhere, which means that eSata devices need at least 2 cables to work. Flash drives and 2.5" HDs don't need enough power to require an external brick, and 80-90% of eSata speed is still much better than the USB2 bottleneck. With double the amount of power over USB2, USB3 could theoretically be used to run 3.5" drives with a double socket plug freeing them from the wall as well.ilkhan - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I've had my P67A-UD4 for almost 3 weeks now. Lets get the chips out already!I'm confused, however. The fist paragraph talks of 4.1Ghz turbo mode and the chart on page 2 lists 3.8Ghz as the max for the 2600K. Is the chart talking about 4-core turbo or what?
Spike - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Isn't it an i7-2600k? The article title says "i5 2600k"... just curious...Ryan Smith - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Oh dear...Fixed. Thanks for that.