The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTWindows 7 Gaming Performance
Our Bench suite is getting a little long in the tooth, so I added a few more gaming tests under Windows 7 with a new group of processors. We'll be adding some of these tests to Bench in the future but the number of datapoints is obviously going to be small as we build up the results.
Batman is an Unreal Engine 3 game and a fairly well received one at that. Performance is measured using the built in benchmark at the highest image quality settings without AA enabled.
Gaming performance is competitive, but we don't see any huge improvements under Batman.
Dragon Age Origins is another very well received game. The 3rd person RPG gives our CPUs a different sort of workload to enjoy:
Dragon Age on the other hand shows an 11.6% gain vs. the i5 760 and equal performance to the Core i7 880. Given that the i5 2400 is slated to be cheaper than the i5 760, I can't complain.
World of Warcraft needs no introduction. An absurd number of people play it, so we're here to benchmark it. Our test favors repeatability over real world frame rates, so our results here will be higher than in the real world with lots of server load. But what our results will tell you is what the best CPU is to get for playing WoW:
Performance in our WoW test is top notch. The i5 2400 is now the fastest CPU we've ever run through our WoW benchmark, the Core i7 980X included.
We've been working on putting together Starcraft II performance numbers, so here's a quick teaser:
A 12% advantage over the Core i7 880 and an 18% improvement over the Core i5 760.
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tatertot - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Can you also confirm whether or not the GPU turbo was also disabled?DanNeely - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Do you think Intel will be sharing preliminary performance/pricing data on LGA 2011 by the time that the first LGA 1155 parts start shipping? I'm on 1366 now and would like to know if staying on the high end platform will be a reasonable option or if there isn't any point in holding off for another 6 months on my upgrade.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I wouldn't expect any near-final LGA-2011 performance data until Q2 next year, well after the LGA-1155 launch.Take care,
Anand
Casper42 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
2 things jumped out at me1) No USB3 - Major FAIL. Putting USB3 in an Intel chipset will drive huge adoption rates rather than this limping in BS by manufacturers today. Not to mention that for Hard Drives, USB2 has been a bottleneck for a long time whereas only top end SSDs today are maxing out SATA3
2) 2 chips with Quad Core and no HT that are identical except for Clock speed and one of them is essentially the 400 and the other is the 500? WTF? Call them the 2410, 2420, 2430, etc. That gives you like 8 or 9 speed bins for that family. Whomever is doing the numbering at Intel needs a swift kick to the head to get them back on track mentally as things just get more and more confusing. You have the i3/i5/i7 today, why not just change it to:
i2 = Dual Core no HT/Turbo
i3 = Dual Core with HT and/or Turbo
i4 = Quad Core no HT/Turbo
i5 = Quad WITH
i6 = Six without
etc
As it stands now we have i5 with both dual and quad core and i7 with 4 and 6. just doesnt make sense.
dertechie - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
That's quite the IPC improvement there. Not quite Netburst to Core 2 but a lot more than I expected (I was expecting something on the order of 5%, with most gains coming from ramping clocks with the extra headroom of 32nm).Question is, do I want the i5-2500K more than I loathe Intel's motherboard department? I'm seeing them bring out new sockets almost as often as new processor families, which really, really does not make me confident in the socket's future.
I will wait at least for Bulldozer benches before buying whatever makes sense at that time (okay, probably weighted in AMD's favor). I've lasted 4 years on this Pentium D, I can live another half of one.
IntelUser2000 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Why do some people still compare Netburst vs. Core 2? The Pentium 4 generation was a clock speed focused that that FAILED to realize its clock speed potential so it looked really bad compared to Core 2.Compared to Core Duo Core 2 was only 15-20% faster. Sandy Bridge manages to do another 20%, which is really good in a generation, yea?
ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Pentium D to SB will be such a huuuuge jump, lol.neslog - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Your excellent article was exciting to read. Thank you!I noticed a small typo on the Windows 7 Gaming Performance page in the first line under the Data Recovery chart : "Clock for clock...to the i7{5} 760..."
ET - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I think that the integrated graphics here are a game changer. Sure nobody will look to them for serious gaming, but finally they're at a point where if you buy any CPU you will be able to play most games, even if at low settings. I'll be looking forward especially to the mobile CPU's. With Bobcat around the corner, I guess next year we will finally see mainstreams notebooks become capable of some game playing, which will be great (and bad for NVIDIA).Exodite - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
What I'd like to see is something like Nvidia's Optimus make it to the desktop. With both AMD and Intel going for on-chip integrated graphics the market is practically begging for a unified standard for graphics switching.The next-generation IGPs look to be competent enough for anything but high-end gaming, which means I should be able to power down my discrete graphics card completely most of the time. The end result would be significant reductions in noise generation, power usage and heat emissions.
Having discreet graphics cards reduced to basically connector-less, slot-in cards for on-demand co-processing seems the logical step.