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 ESTThe Lineup
I don’t include a lot of super markety slides in these launch reviews, but this one is worthy of a mention:
Sandy Bridge is launching with no less than 29 different SKUs today. That’s 15 for mobile and 14 for desktop. Jarred posted his full review of the mobile Core i7-2820QM, so check that out if you want the mobile perspective on all of this.
By comparison, this time last year Intel announced 11 mobile Arrandale CPUs and 7 desktop parts. A year prior we got Lynnfield with 3 SKUs and Clarksfield with 3 as well. That Sandy Bridge is Intel’s biggest launch ever goes without saying. It’s also the most confusing. While Core i7 exclusively refers to processors with 4 or more cores (on the desktop at least), Core i5 can mean either 2 or 4 cores. Core i3 is reserved exclusively for dual-core parts.
Intel promised that the marketing would all make sense one day. Here we are, two and a half years later, and the Core i-branding is no clearer. At the risk of upsetting all of Intel Global Marketing, perhaps we should return to just labeling these things with their clock speeds and core counts? After all, it’s what Apple does—and that’s a company that still refuses to put more than one button on its mice. Maybe it’s worth a try.
Check Jarred’s article out for the mobile lineup, but on desktop here’s how it breaks down:
Processor | Core Clock | Cores / Threads | L3 Cache | Max Turbo | Max Overclock Multiplier | TDP | Price |
Intel Core i7-2600K | 3.4GHz | 4 / 8 | 8MB | 3.8GHz | 57x | 95W | $317 |
Intel Core i7-2600 | 3.4GHz | 4 / 8 | 8MB | 3.8GHz | 42x | 95W | $294 |
Intel Core i5-2500K | 3.3GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.7GHz | 57x | 95W | $216 |
Intel Core i5-2500 | 3.3GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.7GHz | 41x | 95W | $205 |
Intel Core i5-2400 | 3.1GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.4GHz | 38x | 95W | $184 |
Intel Core i5-2300 | 2.8GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.1GHz | 34x | 95W | $177 |
Intel Core i3-2120 | 3.3GHz | 2 / 4 | 3MB | N/A | N/A | 65W | $138 |
Intel Core i3-2100 | 2.93GHz | 2 / 4 | 3MB | N/A | N/A | 65W | $117 |
Intel is referring to these chips as the 2nd generation Core processor family, despite three generations of processors carrying the Core architecture name before it (Conroe, Nehalem, and Westmere). The second generation is encapsulated in the model numbers for these chips. While all previous generation Core processors have three digit model numbers, Sandy Bridge CPUs have four digit models. The first digit in all cases is a 2, indicating that these are “2nd generation” chips and the remaining three are business as usual. I’d expect that Ivy Bridge will swap out the 2 for a 3 next year.
What you will see more of this time around are letter suffixes following the four digit model number. K means what it did last time: a fully multiplier unlocked part (similar to AMD’s Black Edition). The K-series SKUs are even more important this time around as some Sandy Bridge CPUs will ship fully locked, as in they cannot be overclocked at all (more on this later).
Processor | Core Clock | Cores / Threads | L3 Cache | Max Turbo | TDP |
Intel Core i7-2600S | 2.8GHz | 4 / 8 | 8MB | 3.8GHz | 65W |
Intel Core i5-2500S | 2.7GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.7GHz | 65W |
Intel Core i5-2500T | 2.3GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.3GHz | 45W |
Intel Core i5-2400S | 2.5GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.3GHz | 65W |
Intel Core i5-2390T | 2.7GHz | 2 / 4 | 3MB | 3.5GHz | 35W |
Intel Core i5-2100T | 2.5GHz | 2 / 4 | 3MB | N/A | 35W |
There are also T and S series parts for desktop. These are mostly aimed at OEMs building small form factor or power optimized boxes. The S stands for “performance optimized lifestyle” and the T for “power optimized lifestyle”. In actual terms the Ses are lower clocked 65W parts while the Ts are lower clocked 35W or 45W parts. Intel hasn’t disclosed pricing on either of these lines but expect them to carry noticeable premiums over the standard chips. There’s nothing new about this approach; both AMD and Intel have done it for a little while now, it’s just more prevalent in Sandy Bridge than before.
More Differentiation
In the old days Intel would segment chips based on clock speed and cache size. Then Intel added core count and Hyper Threading to the list. Then hardware accelerated virtualization. With Sandy Bridge the matrix grows even bigger thanks to the on-die GPU.
Processor | Intel HD Graphics | Graphics Max Turbo | Quick Sync | VT-x | VT-d | TXT | AES-NI |
Intel Core i7-2600K | 3000 | 1350MHz | Y | Y | N | N | Y |
Intel Core i7-2600 | 2000 | 1350MHz | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Intel Core i5-2500K | 3000 | 1100MHz | Y | Y | N | N | Y |
Intel Core i5-2500 | 2000 | 1100MHz | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Intel Core i5-2400 | 2000 | 1100MHz | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Intel Core i5-2300 | 2000 | 1100MHz | Y | Y | N | N | Y |
Intel Core i3-2120 | 2000 | 1100MHz | Y | N | N | N | N |
Intel Core i3-2100 | 2000 | 1100MHz | Y | N | N | N | Y |
While almost all SNB parts support VT-x (the poor i3s are left out), only three support VT-d. Intel also uses AES-NI as a reason to force users away from the i3 and towards the i5. I’ll get into the difference in GPUs in a moment.
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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.