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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ytoledano - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I'm in desperate need of memory. I bought the 3930K with 48GB as soon as it was released. If the 3820 was available then I would have gotten it and saved the cash for more memory. I guess this chip is useful for those just looking for SB-E features like 8 slot 4 channel memory or the PCI-E channels.Taft12 - Sunday, January 1, 2012 - link
One day guys like you will learn Xeon/Opteron workstation platforms exist and really aren't all that expensive.futurepastnow - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
#4: You need a new PC right now and can't afford a 6-8 core CPU but would like to upgrade later.hechacker1 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Somewhat true. I have an i7 920, and would love to upgrade to a Gulftown 6-core now that is considered old.However, the price isn't coming down. It seems to be stuck at around $550 despite lower priced 4 core processors performing better at low threaded benchmarks.
So it may make sense to just pay the price for the 6 core version if you really need it. Unless you are ready to go very long term in waiting for the price to come down.
I imagine when Ivy-E comes out (with 8 cores?) perhaps then the old 6-core processors will finally get real cheap.
piroroadkill - Monday, January 2, 2012 - link
Unlikely. This upgrade path is ridiculous - it gives you a 4 core CPU that is effectively a wasted investment, hoping that the 6 cores come down.Go check out the best CPUs in socket 775 - Q9550, Q9650, and maybe the fabled Q9550S with its lower TDP.
These things are still ridiculously expensive, and won't budge because people want the best on their old platform.
CW1 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
"This also really provides that budget friendly high-end part for X79, basically the successor to the i7-920 for entry level enthusiasts. X79 still has its glaring omissions (USB 3.0, limited SATA6G, no Thunderbolt etc) but the 3820 makes it look better compared to SB and even IB."
The 3820 is essentially the Sandy Bridge's i7-920. With what benchmarks I can find, it appears the 2600 runs around 10% faster than the i7-920 and with the 3820 running a few % faster than the 2600, I just don't see good reason to upgrade my aging i7-920 just yet. Perhaps we can convince Anand to compare the i7-920 to the new 3820...
Sure, 32gb of memory would be great! The cost of that memory is a large page file size and a large hibernation size. Using recommended page file size, that's 64gb of precious SSD space!!
hechacker1 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I know it's possible to easily relocate the swap file, but I think you're right, you can't easily move the hiberfil.sys.But then I rarely hibernate my desktop PC. It goes into S3 sleep, which is IMHO, good enough. Unless you are prone to frequent power outages.
peterfares - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Manually set the page file size then. There is no need to waste all that space on a page file that will rarely get used. I have 8GB in my laptop with a 128GB SSD. I set the page file to only 2GB.CW1 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
Yeah, that's why I said "recommended". Although I've got 12gb ram and still have my page size set to 12gb. When my SSD starts running low on space I'll shrink it down.You could relocate the pagefile to a differnet drive, but it's something you'd want on an SSD. :)
Regardless, Intel hasn't provided any real incentive to upgrade my i7-920. I was really hoping that SandyBridge-E would be my next upgrade (I've got the itch!), but it looks like Ivy Bridge will be it.
Unfortunately, this appears a result of no real competition for Intel other than within itself. There's nothing to push the price of performance down. AMD has become all but forgotten. Unless they make a big splash in the CPU market their market share will continue to dwindle. It's unfortunate...all my machines have switched to Intel...the last AMD was a x2 250 for my htpc. With Sandy Bridge, I finally upgraded that machine so I could use the onboard GPU.
dj christian - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
You shouldn't shrink the pagefile when your's SSD is running low on space. Trust me!