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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thewhat - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
Because the 980X is a 6 core and the 950 is a 4 core!It doesn't make sense to compare a 6 core to a 4 core when there's an $800 price difference.
A 1366 4 core (preferably at the same CPU speed) would make much more sense to see the differences in various architectures/sockets.
SteelCity1981 - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
ok and the diff in performance would be what now? if they are showing you the diff and how well the new 2 gen cpu's are to even a $1000 cpu what makes you think that the Core i7 950 which is slower in performance then a 980X would fair? I mean it's common logic that if the 2nd gens can run almost on par in many bench test with a 980X then obv it's going to run better then the Core i7 950's.kake - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link
Damn you Intel! Damn you to hell!!I have been living with an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ since 2003ish. This was mostly because I liked the Soundstorm that did a very good Dolby Digital Live output. For the last eight months I've been having to run it at about 2/3rds speed because all the caps on the motherboard burst, and it ran at 80C all the time. The GPU fan died and I wired a 80mm fan on top of it, but it had overheated once too often to do any 3D work. The DVD burner wouldn't read or write, the DVD reader wouldn't open except under duress. The SATA bus started to scramble any data read or written through it, the second LAN port (the good one) died, and the USB would usually demand a musical chairs routine with the mouse and keyboard to get them to work.
So last week I bought all the bits and built a very reasonably priced (370 with shipping and tax) i3-530 based HTPC. I've never seen anything so gorgeous as the first time I played Avatar in 1080p on the plasma.
And now you tell me all this?
Damn you Intel, I'm sick of progress.
juampavalverde - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link
There is a technological reason to bury 2 sockets that are still alive? they are screaming performance yet! i dont get what intel wants with this behavior, ¿Hate from the IT sector? i love the performance, but it is designed in a so closed and trickery way, and completely dropping two nice and stablished platforms, this thing wants to be hated. I hope amd destroys this crazy ideas of intel with llano oem sales, even being inferior in cpu performance.Googer - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
What exactly does a Lifestyle processor do?mino - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
Probably cuts your hair while playing Crisis :)Googer - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
More like it shops for a convertible for you while you worry about your hair loss in your mid life Crysis.Googer - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
More like it shops for a convertible for you while you worry about your hair loss in your mid life Crysis.Googer - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
I understand what the difference between unlocked, regular, and power saving CPUs are. But what exactly does Intel mean by a Lifestyle processor? How is it different from the others? What exactly is a "Lifestyle CPU"?zepi - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
What does the mystical "load power" mean? Does it mean running Prime95, Furmark, both or even something "real world" like Starcraft 2?