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 Test
To keep the review length manageable we're presenting a subset of our results here. For all benchmark results and even more comparisons be sure to use our performance comparison tool: Bench.
| Motherboard: |
ASUS P7H57DV- EVO (Intel H57) |
| Hard Disk: |
Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) Crucial RealSSD C300 |
| Memory: |
Corsair DDR3-1600 2x4GB (9-9-9-24) Corsair DDR3-1333 4x1GB (7-7-7-20) Corsair DDR3-1333 2x2GB (7-7-7-20) Patriot DDR3-1600 2x4GB (9-9-9-24) |
| Video Card: |
eVGA GeForce GTX 280 (Vista 64) ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Windows 7) MSI GeForce GTX 580 (Windows 7) |
| Video Drivers: |
AMD Catalyst 10.12 (Windows 7) NVIDIA ForceWare 293.09 (Windows 7) ATI Catalyst 9.12 (Windows 7) NVIDIA ForceWare 180.43 (Vista64) NVIDIA ForceWare 178.24 (Vista32) |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920x1200 |
| OS: |
Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit (for SYSMark) Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Windows 7 x64 |
Special thanks to Corsair for sending an 8GB Vengeance kit for this review:
As well as Patriot for sending an 8GB Viper Xtreme kit:
All of our brand new tests (Civilization V, Visual Studio) use 8GB memory configurations enabled by both Corsair and Patriot.
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dansus - Saturday, February 19, 2011 - link
Looking at the results of Quick Sync transcoding, the results are very interesting.But which h264 encoder is ArcSoft using, im guessing its Mainconcept, would like to compare QS with x264 to be sure of the results.
In future, be nice to see the original frame to compare with too. Without the original, comparing just the encoded frames means little.
7eventh - Sunday, February 20, 2011 - link
Looking at cbscores.com (using the actual Cinebench 11.5) the 2600K is not THAT glorious at rendring-speed ... Why did you use Cinebench 10?pshen7 - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - link
Who in the world named it Sandy Bridge? And Cougar Point is no better. They need a better marketing department. Seriously.Peter Shen, Koowie.com
zzzxtreme - Thursday, March 3, 2011 - link
does that mean I can't install windows XP/DOS on UEFI motherboards?dwade123 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Intel i3 2100 is so underrated. It beats AMD's fastest's 6 core and older i7 Quadcores in many games and is only a little slower in other areas.Wouggie - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
With an even improved i7990 Extreme now out, with a base speed of 3.46 GHz, which would be the better choice, considering I am going to using a dedicated graphics card Nvidia Quadro 4000.Also. what do you see on the horizon for three channel motherboards with more than 2 SATA lll 6 Gb/s connectors?
georgevt - Sunday, March 27, 2011 - link
The benchmarks against the AMD processors are useless. All the compare is core-to-core performance (4 core to 4 core). You should be comparing is comparably priced processors/systems. For example, the 6-core AMD 1090T costs a hundred dollars less than the i7 2600 at newegg.com, yet your benchmarks fail to provide any comparative benchmarks. It's quite possible that for some applications, that the 6-core AMD may perform better than the more expensive i4-core 7 processors in your benchmarks.scurrier - Friday, April 1, 2011 - link
Anand says, "frequency domain (how often pixels of a certain color appear)," but this definition of the frequency domain is incorrect. Frequency domain in the case of video is a 2 dimensional discrete cosine transform of the frame. It is not a count of pixels like a histogram (binning) or anything.aka_Warlock - Saturday, April 30, 2011 - link
Would be nice to see som test of how much of a performance difference lacking VT-d has on th CPU?AbdurRauf - Monday, May 2, 2011 - link
Does the QuickSync handle uprezing or only transcoding? Have you looked at the new WinFast HPVC1111 SpursEnginex4 and compared it to Quicksync, Cuda and Stream encoding and uprezing?