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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Roland00Address - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
Yes the memory is cheaper (about $160). It is not "much much cheaper" (your words) anymore.An i7 2600k is $299 at amazon.com and newegg with free shipping and no tax in many states. That is a difference of +15 compared to the speculated price of 285 for the core i7 3820 (so a total of +175 for memory and cpu)
x79 motherboards cost between $215 to $470 on newegg. Cheapest board with 8 ram slots is $280
p67 motherboards cost between $95 to $310 on newegg
z68 motherboards cost between $90 to $340 on newegg
So you may save $175 on cpu and memory but you are going to spend another $100 ish on the motherboard making your savings less than a 100 dollars. A hundred dollars is not a small amount but we are probably talking all said and done talking about a computer that is going to cost between $1000 and $1500 to build, thus a 100 dollars is between 6 to 10% of the computer price.
There is a reason to get the x79 chipset, but if you are getting it due to memory, please do it so you can use you 64 GBs of memory instead of a mere 32. Do it for that reason or do it for the 6 core cpus, the pci-e . Do not get a x79 chipset just so you can go cheap on the memory and only get 32 GBs.
Do not wait another 3 months so you can save a small amount on memory.
Ammaross - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Article: "If you're seriously considering anything in the SNB-E family, the latter [Ivy Bridge] isn't going to matter and the former will be of arguable value"piroroadkill: "Anyone who wanted a system of this performance already bought a 2500 or 2600K and overclocked the balls off it..."
With tri-gate, die-shrink, and small bump in performance, IVB will be a nice setup due to being highly overclockable (I hope!). If SNB can OC to ~4.5 on air (running 4.4 on my rig), IVB with die shrink would hopefully manage something approaching 5ghz (remember, tri-gate does a better job with power flow and reception at lower voltage or higher speeds...). And the pricing lineup has already been leaked and shows fairly similar pricing to SNB launch, so I'm just sitting on my hands until April.
p05esto - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I've got an i7 940 system and skipped SB and SB-E, but Ivy is my upgrade plan at the moment. SB-E let me down, so I'm waiting till April now. And even then, my i7 940 on SSD does everything I need it to do and FAST..... it's just an upgrade itch that needs to be scratched every couple years (we're suckers perhaps).Coup27 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
On the chipset block diagram, it says PCI Express 2.0 is branching off the CPU and also the chipset? Shouldn't that be 3?darckhart - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Yes that confused me a bit as well. Or is that pcie v3.0 only off the cpu and v2.0 off the x79?deruberhanyok - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Every time I see the "i7 3xxx" number I get excited and think someone got an early Ivy Bridge sample.Then I remember that Intel couldn't even stick to their own naming convention for two generations of the Core iX series. :(
p05esto - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
No kidding, that crap pisses me off. Why is so damn hard to come up with a simple naming convention that is intuitive and can be used for decades? Doesn't have to be fancy, they could prefix the convention with some silly name like Pentium, Core i7 or whatever but then give the freaking thing some letter/number designation that clearly shows what is what. I could come up with 10 different numbering schemes without even trying!descendency - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Yeah. I don't get why they can't just name things likei3s...2100,2150,2200,2250
i5s... 2300, 2350, 2400, 2450
i7 (1155)...2500, 2550, 2600, 2650
i7 (2011)... 2700, 2750, 2800, 2850
with Extreme chips being 2900 X...
add in K, X, S and whatever other letters you want at the end
Then, when Ivy Bridge comes out, change those 2s to 3s... Oh. and when Haswell comes out... make those 3s into 4s... maybe even have an i3 2270 when you want to sell the better binned chips at a higher price.
dj christian - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
I don't get it, why would you sell the i3 2270 at a higher price? The SB is in it's way out..descendency - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I know it would be expensive, but it would be nice occassionally to get a review of an entire platform and what is possible on it.For example, what FPS could you get in 6 monitor setups with 4x GPUs on SNB-E vs SNB. (or something like that)
How much does extra ram really benefit in those kinds of applications.
It just doesn't make sense to review all CPUs on even planes because all CPUs are not designed to do what some CPUs are and that's why they are 500-1000 dollars each.