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 EST3D Rendering Performance
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we have a new champ once more. The 2600K is slightly ahead of the 980X here, while the 2500K matches the performance of the i7 975 without Hyper Threading enabled. You really can't beat the performance Intel is offering here.
The i3 2100 is 11% faster than last year's i3 540, and the same performance as the Athlon II X4 645.
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
Single threaded performance sees a huge improvement with Sandy Bridge. Even the Core i3 2100 is faster than the 980X in this test. Regardless of workload, light or heavy, Sandy Bridge is the chip to get.
POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.
I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.
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krazyderek - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
putting the 3000 on the the 2600k and 2500k parts ALMOST made sense as an up-sell, but you can't even use their IGP when on a P series board when you're overclocking! If the Z series wont' be out for a while why the hell would i buy an overclocking chip now? so i can spend more money to replace my H series motherboard with a Z series? Nice try.It's frustrating that you have to pick your sacrifice.... you either get the 3000 with the K sku, or you get VT-d and TXT with the standard sku. Intel doesn't have an offering with both which is kind of ridiculous for high end chips.
mino - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Yeah, what is most disappointing is lack of Virtualization support even from i3's (!)For christ's sake, Virtualization is the most BASIC requirement for any box today and even s775 Pentium, not to mention the WHOLE AMD lineup have it!
For me this means nothing sub-i5 is useable in ANY capacity, business or private while i5 are (financially) and overkill for most uses.
Well done Intel. You have just lost ~100 $100 certain sales this year. Whatever, will have to wait for Llano for the mainstream stuff.
DrSlothy - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 - link
I think that's an error in the review table, though one I've seen in every Core review so far - did Intel marketing give out wrong specs?Intel website shows the entire Sandy Bridge line-up to have Hardware Virtualisation (VT-x) support, though some are missing VT-d
tech6 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Another great review from Anandtech - thanks guys.It seems odd that the 3000 series graphics engine would be only included on a part designed for over clocking and the boards that support overclocking can't handle integrated graphics. I would have thought that the other way around would have made more sense.
In any case the 2600K and 2500K look like great value parts and are just what I was waiting for!
DanNeely - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Does anyone know if QuickSync will appear on LGA-2011 chips? I know they aren't going to have the general purpose GPU components, but this is enough of a performance booster that I'd think Intel would want to keep it on their high end consumer platform in some fashion.ThaHeretic - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I see TXT in the last chart above with no explanation as to what it is or why it is differentiated. They -took out- functionality from the unlocked parts? That seems backwards...Kevin G - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
This functionality will likely appear in Sandybridge Xeons for socket 1155. Intel *generally* segments the Xeons by core count and clock speed, not by feature set like they do for consumer chips. The other feature Intel is holding back is ECC which should be standard in socket 1155 Xeons.DanNeely - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
It's a hardware security feature. It's best known for the Trusted Platform Module; an on board cryptographic device used in some corporate computers but not used in consumer systems. Probably they just want to keep people from building high end secure servers with cheap, overclocked K parts instead of the much more profitable XEONs for 2-3x as much.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Execution_Tec...
kache - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I think I'll wait for the SB xeons and the new EVGA SR-2, hoping that EVGA will release it.adrien - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Numbers will probably speak by themselves. ;-)17:37 ~ % md5sum *.png
bee3c83b3ef49504e0608a601a03bfc2 6870.png
bee3c83b3ef49504e0608a601a03bfc2 snb.png
So the 6870 and cpu-rendering have the same image.