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 ESTVideo Encoding Performance
Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled.
Despite the greatness that is Quick Sync, there are no editing/high quality transcode tools that support Intel's hardware transcode engine. Luckily, Sandy Bridge is still very fast when it comes to software encoding. Our WME test only shows minimal gains thanks to the architectural improvements however.
Graysky's x264 HD test uses x264 to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
Other than the Core i7 980X, there's nothing quicker than Sandy Bridge. The Core i7 2600K is 10% faster than the Core i7 975, and the 2500K easily outpaces its Lynnfield rivals. The i3 2100 is quicker than its predecessor, however not by much. In these heavily threaded situations, AMD's Athlon II X4 645 is a better option than the 2100.
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ac2 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Oh yes and another-bloody-socket-thank-you-so-much...Lets not forget that the only reason Intel can get away with all this is that AMD have been off their game for a while now..
Wonder if ARM will be the next one to give Intel the occasional kick it needs to be a bit more customer friendly...
Hrel - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
The HD5670 can be had for 65 bucks, so why include a 70 dollar 5570? illogical.Taft12 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
He's talking about the general online price across a variety of sites and OEMs (Sapphire, Asus, Palit, etc) not a one-off MIR-inclusive price that can be found only by the obsessive.kevith - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Man, this is awesome, my wallet is trying to hide, but it won't do it any good...I took the jump to AMD when Phenom II arrived, a friend of mine bought my C2D E7400 system, and already then I regretted when I was done building. There's no two ways about it, Intel systems - if they aren't the absolute low-end - runs so much smoother.
Which seems to be the case again, even at a reasonable price.
There's one thing about the review I don't really understand: "...Another Anandtech editor put it this way: You get the same performance at a lower price..."
Has he read the review?
As far as I can see, you get pretty much more performance at a lower price.
xsilver - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Is there going to be a memory scaling test for sandy bridge?eg. how much of a performance gap with ddr1333 ram vs ddr2000
also does sandy bridge's gpu allow for multi monitor setups? what about when stacked with a discrete gpu?
RicowSQL - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Hey guys, two things i'm missing from the SB reviews over the web:1) How well does the new IMC scales to memory clocks? I guess it's a matter of time until someone performs a in-depth analysis on that matter, but i'm particularly interested on that...
2) Adobe's Flash decoding can take advantage of Intel IGPs acceleration through Clear Video technology. Will it work in the new HD2000/3000 series as well?
ibudic1 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
But Why not VS 2010?Taft12 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Same reason it takes a while for AT to provide comparisons of the latest games - it takes an eternity to run a benchmark on all CPUs going back a couple generations.Taft12 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
I think this might be an error in your chart -- the last one on page 3 shows a Y for the i3-2100 in the AES-NI column. I would love to have this feature on an i3 CPU, but the following paragraph states "Intel also uses AES-NI as a reason to force users away from the i3 and towards the i5" which leads me to believe that i3 doesn't have said feature.Please let me know if I'm wrong so I can get my pre-order in!!!
nedjinski - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Please comment on the Sandy Bridge / DRM 'controversy'.Thanks.