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 ESTResolution Scaling with Intel HD Graphics 3000
All of our tests on the previous page were done at 1024x768, but how much of a hit do you really get when you push higher resolutions? Does the gap widen between a discrete GPU and Intel's HD Graphics as you increase resolution?
On the contrary: low-end GPUs run into memory bandwidth limitations just as quickly (if not quicker) than Intel's integrated graphics. Spend about $70 and you'll see a wider gap, but if you pit Intel's HD Graphics 3000 against a Radeon HD 5450 the two actually get closer in performance the higher the resolution is—at least in memory bandwidth bound scenarios:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 stresses compute a bit more at higher resolutions and thus the performance gap widens rather than closes:
For the most part, at low quality settings, Intel's HD Graphics 3000 scales with resolution similarly to a low-end discrete GPU.
Graphics Quality Scaling
The biggest issue with integrated and any sort of low-end graphics is that you have to run games at absurdly low quality settings to avoid dropping below smooth frame rates. The impact of going to higher quality settings is much greater on Intel's HD Graphics 3000 than on a discrete card as you can see by the chart below.
The performance gap between the two is actually its widest at WoW's "Good" quality settings. Moving beyond that however shrinks the gap a bit as the Radeon HD 5450 runs into memory bandwidth/compute bottlenecks of its own.
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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.