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
Gaming Performance
Gaming performance across the board echoes what we've already seen a lot of - the 3820 shows marginal gains over the 2600K.
Civilization V
Civ V's lateGameView benchmark presents us with two separate scores: average frame rate for the entire test as well as a no-render score that only looks at CPU performance.
Crysis: Warhead
Dawn of War II
DiRT 3
We ran two DiRT 3 benchmarks to get an idea for CPU bound and GPU bound performance. First the CPU bound settings:
Metro 2033
Starcraft 2
World of Warcraft
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Tetracycloide - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I like the way you think. Replyvectorm12 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I doubt the extra PCI-e lanes have a tangible real-world benefit when gaming to be honest.However if you use the cards mainly for compute I in no way doubt there's potential for a massive performance increase to be had as shown by the 7970 review.
All in all I consider SNB-E to be a gigantic letdown as it really doesn't cater to enthusiasts as much as to workstation users.
Considering the cost of the platform I doubt one of the lower tier XEON platforms wouldn't be more cost-efficient in the long run, considering ECC RAM etc. Reply
geekfool - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I don' t intend to do much gaming,but I'd really like to have 20 PCIe-3.0 lanes available so I can have a 16x graphics card now and add a 4x SSD-card in a few years without having to halve the bandwidth on the graphics card! Replythunderising - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Was expecting more improvements from this TOCK of Intel's Replypiroroadkill - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Ivy Bridge is right round the corner. Is anyone really buying a new system at the moment? Replypiroroadkill - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Obviously there's a place at the very high end for the 6-core part, but a 4-core part at this level is pointless. Anyone who wanted a system of this performance already bought a 2500 or 2600K and overclocked the balls off it, so for those people, nothing less than Ivy Bridge or beyond will do.Beats me. Reply
AssBall - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well... This chip might get really interesting once we get the pricing numbers for Ivy Bridge. It is a solid chip I would consider if equivalent Ivy Bridge is priced high. I don't see any reason for Intel not to price Ivy Bridge highly either. They can compete with AMD on their lower end parts. Replygeekfool - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
They've already indicated that the LGA 1155 IBs will be at the same price points as the SBs...are you asking about the low-end IB-E chip? ReplyDenithor - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Anyone who needs large amounts of RAM without the cost of 8GB sticks would be happy with this option. 8x4GB is much much cheaper than 4x8GB... ReplyRoland00Address - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
4gb sticks of ddr3 memory is about $3 to $4 dollars per gb8gb sticks of ddr3 memory is about $9 dollars per gb. These stick prices have gone down in price recently to much more reasonable levels. Reply