Intel Core i7 3820 Review: $285 Quad-Core Sandy Bridge E
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 29, 2011 2:28 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Sandy Bridge E
Final Words
I see three reasons why you'd want the Core i7 3820:
1. You need PCIe 3.0 today and/or you need more PCIe lanes than a Core i7 2600K can provide,
2. You need tons of memory bandwidth for a particular application,
3. You want a 2600K but you need a platform that can support more memory (32GB+).
If you fall into any of those categories, the 3820 gets the job done. It's easily as fast as the fastest LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge without adding significant power consumption or really being limited on the overclocking side either. The 3820 admittedly targets a niche, but it does so without any real trade offs. If you land outside of the 3820's niche however, you're better served by the 2500/2600K at a lower total platform cost or a 3930K/3960X if you're running a heavily threaded workload and can use the extra cores.
What About Ivy?
By the time the 3820 is available for purchase early next year, Ivy Bridge will be just about a quarter away. For desktop users Ivy Bridge is really only going to bring lower power consumption and a better integrated GPU. If you're seriously considering anything in the SNB-E family, the latter isn't going to matter and the former will be of arguable value. I do expect that we'll see a drop-in upgrade path to IVB-E at some point in early 2013 if you're concerned about platform longevity, although Intel hasn't officially committed to such a thing. It's pretty safe to say that you'll be on your own after IVB-E however, Haswell should be a fairly large departure from IVB-E in a lot of senses.
For everyone else, if you need a desktop system today - the LGA-1155 Sandy Bridge is still a viable option. There's always something better around the corner but I have no issues recommending either that you buy now or you wait for IVB. If you can wait, you'll be getting a cooler CPU with better integrated graphics and faster Quick Sync.
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Tetracycloide - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I like the way you think.vectorm12 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I doubt the extra PCI-e lanes have a tangible real-world benefit when gaming to be honest.However if you use the cards mainly for compute I in no way doubt there's potential for a massive performance increase to be had as shown by the 7970 review.
All in all I consider SNB-E to be a gigantic letdown as it really doesn't cater to enthusiasts as much as to workstation users.
Considering the cost of the platform I doubt one of the lower tier XEON platforms wouldn't be more cost-efficient in the long run, considering ECC RAM etc.
thunderising - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Was expecting more improvements from this TOCK of Intel'spiroroadkill - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Ivy Bridge is right round the corner. Is anyone really buying a new system at the moment?piroroadkill - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Obviously there's a place at the very high end for the 6-core part, but a 4-core part at this level is pointless. Anyone who wanted a system of this performance already bought a 2500 or 2600K and overclocked the balls off it, so for those people, nothing less than Ivy Bridge or beyond will do.Beats me.
AssBall - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well... This chip might get really interesting once we get the pricing numbers for Ivy Bridge. It is a solid chip I would consider if equivalent Ivy Bridge is priced high. I don't see any reason for Intel not to price Ivy Bridge highly either. They can compete with AMD on their lower end parts.Denithor - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Anyone who needs large amounts of RAM without the cost of 8GB sticks would be happy with this option. 8x4GB is much much cheaper than 4x8GB...Roland00Address - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
4gb sticks of ddr3 memory is about $3 to $4 dollars per gb8gb sticks of ddr3 memory is about $9 dollars per gb. These stick prices have gone down in price recently to much more reasonable levels.
Denithor - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well, even at that rate it's still a considerable savings:8x 4GB x $4/GB = $128
4x 8GB x $9/GB = $288
For a net savings of ~$160. Which, combined with the lower price on the chip, would completely offset the increased cost of the motherboard.
Plus, if 32GB just isn't enough, you could go 8x8GB which you simply cannot do on SB/IB setups (only ship with 4 physical RAM slots).
14ccKemiskt - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well spoken!