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 ESTGeneral Performance: SYSMark 2007
Our journey starts with SYSMark 2007, the only all-encompassing performance suite in our review today. The idea here is simple: one benchmark to indicate the overall performance of your machine. SYSMark 2007 ends up being more of a dual-core benchmark as the applications/workload show minimal use of more than two threads.
The 2600K is our new champion, the $317 chip is faster than Intel's Core i7 980X here as SYSMark 2007 doesn't really do much with the latter's extra 2 cores. Even the 2500K is a hair faster than the 980X. Compared to the Core i5 750, the upgrade is a no brainer - Sandy Bridge is around 20% faster at the same price point as Lynnfield.
Compared to Clarkdale, the Core i3 2100 only manages a 5% advantage howeer.
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Once again, we have a new king - the 2600K is 9.7% faster than the 980X in our Photoshop CS4 test and the 2500K is just about equal to it. The Core i3 2100 does much better compared to the i3 540, outpacing it by around 30% and nearly equaling the performance of AMD's Phenom II X6 1100T.
283 Comments
View All Comments
omelet - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
> The Sandy Bridge Review: Intel Core i5 2600K, i5 2500K and Core i3 2100 TestedDoesn't look fixed over here.
Zoomer - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Score one for intel marketing!Oh wait...
Beenthere - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I'll stick with my AMD 965 BE as it delivers a lot of performance for the price and I don't get fleeced on mobo and CPU prices like with Intel stuff.geek4life!! - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Exactly what I have been waiting on, time to build my RIG again. Been without a PC for 1 year now and itching to build a new one.Game on baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Doormat - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
If QuickSync is only available to those using the integrated GPU, does that mean you cant use QS with a P67 board, since they don't support integrated graphics? If so, I'll end up having to buy a dedicated QS box (a micro-ATX board, a S or T series CPU seem to be up to that challenge). Also what if the box is headless (e.g. Windows Home Server)?Does the performance of QS have to do with the number of EUs? The QS testing was on a 12-EU CPU, does performance get cut in half on a 6-EU CPU (again, S or T series CPUs would be affected).
No mention of Intel AVX functions. I suppose thats more of an architecture thing (which was covered separately), but no benchmarks (synthetic or otherwise) to demo the new feature.
MeSh1 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Yeah I think this is the case or according the the blurb below you can connect a monitor to the IGP in order to use QS. Is this a design flaw? Seems like a messy workaround :(" you either have to use the integrated GPU alone or run a multimonitor setup with one monitor connected to Intel’s GPU in order to use Quick Sync."
SandmanWN - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
The sad part is for all the great encoding you get, the playback sucks. Jacked up.Doormat - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I'm not that interested in playback on that device - its going to be streamed to my PS3, DLNA-enabled TVs, iPad/iPhone, etc. Considering this wont be supported as a hackintosh for a while, I might as well build a combo transcoding station and WHS box.JarredWalton - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
How do you figure "playback sucks"? If you're using MPC-HC, it's currently broken, but that's an application issue not a problem with SNB in general.Absolution75 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Thank you so much for the VS benchmarks!! Programmers rejoice!