PC Prospective's takeTom's wrote:No doubt, there’s a lot going on in this launch. The Sandy Bridge introduction hits a number of high notes that have me dusting off an award, while simultaneously compelling me to cringe at a couple of Intel’s clumsier moves.
Let’s start with the bad, so I can wrap up on a positive note for the New Year.
Overclocking isn’t handled well at all. Really, the only viable option for power users is a K-series SKU. That’s not entirely bad, of course. Less than one year ago, the only unlocked option in Intel’s portfolio was priced at $999. The fact that we have a couple of choices in the $200 and $300 ranges is great. But the limited overclocking (Core i5/i7) and outright lack of options (Core i3) strikes a sour chord sure to burn off a lot of the enthusiast equity Intel earned by launching the K-series chips last year.
The graphics situation, at least on the desktop, is also pretty whacky. Of the 14 models introduced at launch, the two best suited to enthusiast-oriented gaming machines with discrete GPUs are the ones armed with Intel’s HD Graphics 3000 engine. The other 12—conceivably candidates for more mainstream gaming builds, office desktops, and HTPCs—sport the downright average HD Graphics 2000 implementation.
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Those two gripes out of the way, how could we not be impressed by Sandy Bridge’s performance? Existing Lynnfield- and Clarkdale-based processors already offer strong performance compared to AMD’s lineup. Significant gains, clock-for-clock, compound in the face of notable frequency increases across the board (thanks to a mature 32 nm process), giving Sandy Bridge an even more commanding position.
I’m also a big fan of Quick Sync. Neither AMD nor Nvidia have an answer to Intel’s decode/encode acceleration, and they’re not expected to any time soon. If you do a lot of video editing or transcoding, an upgrade to Sandy Bridge might be warranted based solely on the time you’ll save by virtue of this feature. Kudos to Intel for getting developer support lined up right out of the gate, too. If the graphics guys could rally the software industry as quickly, we'd already be swimming in CUDA- and APP-accelerated titles.
If there was one Sandy Bridge-based SKU that I’d personally recommend to friends and family building new PCs, it’d be the Core i5-2500K. Its performance relative to AMD’s lineup and the rest of Intel’s stack is noteworthy—especially given its price tag just north of $200. The i5-2500K circumvents Sandy Bridge's overclocking challenges with an unlocked multiplier, and I'm counting on gamers to drop it onto a P67-based motherboard, skirting the integrated graphics debate entirely.
And while this is only the second time in two and a half years that I’ve dusted off the Recommended Buy award for a very deserving processor, you’d better believe I have an eye to the future, waiting to see how AMD’s Bulldozer architecture contends with Intel’s ever-plodding tick-tock cadence.
Bit-tech's analysisPC Pro wrote:Pricing and Availability
All of the quad-core variants of the Sandy Bridge processors we looked at today should be available in the next week or so with the dual-core versions coming maybe a month later. Intel's street pricing looks like this:
* Core i7-2600K - $317
* Core i5 2500K - $216
* Core i5-2400 - $184
* Core i3-2100 - $117
All things considered, I think these prices are very compelling and it's going to hard to keep the Core i7-2600K out of multiple locations on our Hardware Leaderboard for long.
Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture is finally here and I was impressed at nearly every turn. The Core i7-2600K should quickly become the mid-range processor of choice for gamers and enthusiasts alike with a combination of performance and value we haven't seen in a long time. Even the lower end Core i3-2100 and Core i5-2400 impressed on the performance front and are actually starting out lower than any Lynnfield processors on the market making them an easy selection for a budget build. The inclusion of the Quick Sync Video is a great feature for consumers and should finally push fast transcoding to the entire market - something the GPU guys have been striving for years now. If only Intel could figure out this whole Intel HD Graphics 3000/2000 segmentation thing, they might have had one of the best and most complete processor launches I can remember. Even as it stands now though, the 2nd Generation Intel Core Processor family is again pushing Intel forward as the dominant microprocessor brand.
The long and short of it? The new Sandy bridge CPU/GPU's from Intel kick ass, the K series I5-2500k (200$) and Core i7-2600K (300$) kick all kinds of ass and go to 4ghtz with stock cooling with no voltage tweaks. With voltage tweaks most are hitting close 5ghtz with just stock intel air cooling Which is @#$#@$ phenomenal from an over-clockers prospective because it means that water cooling systems might be able to hit 6ghtz and we might see 7-8 ghtz from vapor-chill or nitrogen based crazy test setups .Bit-tech wrote:The Core i5-2500K amazed us with its stock-speed performance – it even beat the epic £750 Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition in the image editing and multi-threaded video encoding tests. Only the higher multi-tasking score of the i7-980X prevented the i5-2500K from being faster overall than the mighty 6-core super-CPU in everyday applications.
The Sandy Bridge lineup gives us some of the easiest conclusions to write that we've ever come across: the new range of Intel CPUs renders almost every other processor redundant and pointless. Only if you need incredible performance in multi-threaded applications should you look beyond the Core i5-2500K for your next CPU.
The GPU still suck balls but it does not suck as much as the previous generations of it. It can now handle HD video properly so it's suitable for home theater systems finally and even play 2007 games with everything turned on. I'd be interested to see the laptop versions of this chip in six months because the Core I5-2500k runs cool if it uses way to much juice for a laptop processor (75 watts at idle) but since the GPU adds nothing on top you might see the first decent mid-sized laptops that combine decent graphics and 5 hour run times soon.
Soon as I can scrap together 600$ I'll be upgrading to a I5-2500k or I7-2600k because it looks like it's going to be a massive step up.
), and I was putting it off until Sandy Bridge dropped. So glad I waited! 4.4 GHz on stock cooling here I come.
