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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fteoath64 - Thursday, May 24, 2012 - link
The 3820 is perfect for your needs and I doubt IB boards will come with 4ch RAM or they were 2011 sockets will be over $500 and very similar performance. An overclocked 3820 according to Overclocked site is the fastest processor out there!. They had their 5Ghz on air but I think 4.7Ghz will kick anything else except for an over-clocked hexacore!.nyran125 - Saturday, January 21, 2012 - link
Anyone who has a 2500K or 2600K would have to be off thier rocker to buy this CPU for the price its asking for.metro_2020 - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
these intel man and company are blood sucker mother f....r. god why not they sell them self to suck money of people go to hell.Twisp - Friday, April 8, 2022 - link
I bought this CPU in part thanks to this review. After 10 years still going strong I am finally feeling the bottleneck and looking for an upgrade. I've been through many GPUs several PSUs and cooling systems and memory, all that is original is this bad boy and the P9X79LE I slapped it in. The system has been remarkably stable and felt competitive for many years, only falling off in the last five years or so. Thanks for the review!