Intel Core i7 3820 Review: $285 Quad-Core Sandy Bridge E
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 29, 2011 2:28 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Sandy Bridge E
Final Words
I see three reasons why you'd want the Core i7 3820:
1. You need PCIe 3.0 today and/or you need more PCIe lanes than a Core i7 2600K can provide,
2. You need tons of memory bandwidth for a particular application,
3. You want a 2600K but you need a platform that can support more memory (32GB+).
If you fall into any of those categories, the 3820 gets the job done. It's easily as fast as the fastest LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge without adding significant power consumption or really being limited on the overclocking side either. The 3820 admittedly targets a niche, but it does so without any real trade offs. If you land outside of the 3820's niche however, you're better served by the 2500/2600K at a lower total platform cost or a 3930K/3960X if you're running a heavily threaded workload and can use the extra cores.
What About Ivy?
By the time the 3820 is available for purchase early next year, Ivy Bridge will be just about a quarter away. For desktop users Ivy Bridge is really only going to bring lower power consumption and a better integrated GPU. If you're seriously considering anything in the SNB-E family, the latter isn't going to matter and the former will be of arguable value. I do expect that we'll see a drop-in upgrade path to IVB-E at some point in early 2013 if you're concerned about platform longevity, although Intel hasn't officially committed to such a thing. It's pretty safe to say that you'll be on your own after IVB-E however, Haswell should be a fairly large departure from IVB-E in a lot of senses.
For everyone else, if you need a desktop system today - the LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge is still a viable option. There's always something better around the corner but I have no issues recommending either that you buy now or you wait for IVB. If you can wait, you'll be getting a cooler CPU with better integrated graphics and faster Quick Sync.
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keristerzt - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Of course, the X79 is support up to 40 lanes, that means you got native 16x16x bandwidth for both cards, this is a great deal, plus it has impressed me by it 4-channel of memory, brings up the bandwidth to 51.2GB/stech6 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
As you can see by the benchmarks, the extra PCI and memory bandwidth will make no difference to your gaming experience whatsoever. Games simply don't require more than SB delivers. However, if you want to be the first kid on your street that has a SB-E then go for it.MySchizoBuddy - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Compute will benefit from it. best option for compute is for 8 full x16 PCI-e.tyan provides a motherboard with those features for Compute servers.
DanNeely - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
The benches anand did are meaningless for a GPU comparison. Where LGA2011 might perform better is on 3/4 GPU setups, but these numbers are for a single 5870.cactusdog - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
This is why Intel didnt release the quad core 3820 with the initial launch of SB-E. It gives us an easy comparison with the 2600K and it highlights just how poor SB-E performs when compared to normal SB.I've always been a supporter of the highend but its hard to like SB-E unless you're prepared to spend $600-$1000 on a 6 core CPU, even then it aint great.
SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Not sure I agree with that, It does slightly better in the benchmarks and the 6 core CPU's for 600$ sounds about right to me.Taft12 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
If you think $600 for a 6-core CPU sounds about right, you're going to lose your shit when I show you the Phenom II X6 prices!nevertell - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well, you're going to lose your shit when I tell you that they are discontinuing all the stars based phenom II x6 processors.iLLz - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I'm not going to lose anything! The Penom II x6 performs worse than Intels Quad Cores so pffft!SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Then you're going to lose your shit when you see this 280$ CPU beating the crap out of the Phenom II X6.Seriously lets keep it in context here. Thats like saying I can buy 6 atom CPU's for 50$ so paying for a phenom is too much.