Hardware Intel Sandy Bridge Review

I believe that the high-end Sandy Bridge E (LGA 2011) chips won't have an integrated GPU, but methinks they are going to be Xeon level expensive.

More worryingly, I read that installing a discrete GPU blocks access to SB's hardware video transcode features, which sucks as according to Tomshardware, it is a fair bit faster.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-core-i7-2600k-core-i5-2500k,2833-5.html

 

I'm sorry bindi I didn't listen to your advice and your infinite wisdom and I bought a i7 950 and the Asus sabertooth motherboard and now you pull this out the bag aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhh!!!!! What can I do???? Help me master bindi

 

^ how about just enjoy the excellent CPU and mobo combination you have just bought?

 

Thanks Material - I don't envy the task of working all this out.. trying to weigh up OLD i5 vs new stuff.. and see whether the difference is worth it

 

Error.

 

Probably not, and especially not for the current prices. But I could use the 750 elsewhere if 875 drops significantly in price. I do have massive amounts of blu-ray ripping to do in future, so a little bit of extra performance wouldn't hurt ;-)

 

@ AshT It does show upon mine mate

 

It's ok my RSS feed updated about 1 minute after I posted and I found the feature

 

Not sure, Clive or James will make the call on when they go up but Intel moving the launch forward has kind of put a crimp in our content schedule so its all a bit up in the air at the moment. I'm sure they will go up ASAP though.

There will be at least one available at launch if the kit in our labs in anything to go by. Don't think we've had chance to take a proper look at it yet though as we had to prioritize the ATX boards for launch. Hopefully It'll follow up in the next few weeks though.

 

More detailed reviews over at anandtech.com.

1156 and 1366 are dead basically and I'm more and more happy about my decision to wait for SandyBridge.

Good to know about the mini-ITX-boards Material, but they aren't listed anwhere as of yet unfortunately. I've allready preordered a i5 2500k + 2x 4GB DDR3 + C300 64GB and been left dead in the water atm waiting for the mini-ITX boards.
Time to get rid of my huge E8400-based ATX-system finally.

 

I suppose getting an i5 2500k rig will increase performance ALOT. Ah yes this upgrade will be worth it as my current pentium t4250, 2 gig ram, vista home, intel GMA 3500 (i think) laptop is just not fast enough. When vista lags upon log in you know you need an upgrade

 

If bulldozer is impressive then AMD are back in the game....

 

Correction, if Bulldozer is impressive, we are in for a price war,

 

I am damn glad the mrs convinced (TOLD) me to pay off the credit card last month and leave buying my new rig til Feb/March time...i am now in for a i5 2500k i think, just look forward to some hardware reviews on a decent mobo board to find to go with it..

Think i owe her dinner for her unrealised wisdom in making me hold off.

 

I wonder how this CPU scores when using SwiftShader. With every new generation the gap between CPU and IGP performance appears to get smaller. With support for gather/scatter instructions they could probably let the CPU efficiently take over the graphics tasks as well, and add more generic cores.

 

Brilliant review, stunning CPU!

 

You can play Minecraft on a Sandy Bridge, but you can't build a sandy bridge on Minecraft...

 

The Core I 7 950 really held its own in the gaming test.

Do you think this was down to the mature X58 Bios, the quality of the motherboard, the specific game (or does this CPU just rock in games)?

If you are a gamer first and last is the 950 still a good choice?

 

With ref to the above I mean Crysis, not X3.

 

Looks like a solid set of chips but my older I5-750 running at 4ghz is really more than I need. I play video games, surf the web and listen to music, not much else on my PC and the price of upgrading is just not right at this moment. In a year or so I will swap out my ATI-5870 for the leading AMD/Nvidia card and maybe add a solid state hard-drive but I don't really see a reason to upgrade my motherboard and CPU at the moment. It would be nice but it's just not for me right now.