Sandy Bridge Review

[affiliate13]

Thanks, but what's early about it?

Not technically early, but NDA got shifted forward so early from the original NDA date. On time by the new NDA date.

[george1979]

Yeah I just read the review on Tom's and it looks good but isn't the quantum leap over the i5 760 I have now (taking price into consideration). Relieved tbh as I only bought it 3 months ago.
Obviously the video encoding/decoding has improved but the majority of people are not using these functions every day to make use of them. Of course this may change as tech like this make it easier.
Also for anyone gaming there doesn't seem to be much incentive to upgrade from 1156 (or spend the extra cash for a new build).
Only problem I had with the Tom's review was that they didn't include the i5 760 in their benchmarks - surely that's the one processor you would want to compare these to?

Edit: Just checked the bit tech review and, while I know graphics play a bigger part here, there really isn't much more gaming performance to be gained from sandy bridge although I do agree with Cat - its a **** review.

[Jay]

Once Scan have a price on the new i7 3XS I will have to go and talk to the bank manager (also known as the wife) and get one ordered!

[Pob255]

Early review up over here if anyone would like a squint at it?
http://www.clunk.org.uk/reviews/asus...rd-review.html

Thanks, but that's not a CPU review

Well it's a motherboard review which is highly tied into cpu with intel's constant socket changes.
And he's comparing a p55 x58 and p67 all at stock and overclocked to 4ghz so it's a very good side by side comparison.

Must say for a high end platform the lack of pci-e lanes on the p67 is disappointing, looks like it'll be a great gaming platform but lacks the flexability of the x58

[kalniel]

Must say for a high end platform the lack of pci-e lanes on the p67 is disappointing, looks like it'll be a great gaming platform but lacks the flexability of the x58

They had to save something back for skt 2011

[badass]

They had to save something back for skt 2011

Or indeed Skt 1356
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/video/.../360/112/6.pdf

IMHO, 4 DDR3 channels and 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes is massive overkill for any desktop I'm interested in but I can see 3 DDR3 channels being useful with a 6-8 core CPU and the 24 PCIe lanes may not be enough for 2 x16 Graphics cards but as they are PCIe 3.0 you can give each GFX card 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes and they'll still have the same bandwidth as an x16 PCIe2.0 connection. Plus 8 spare of course.
If the GFX card is too old to support PCIe 3.0 (like all current graphics cards) then it doesn't suffer much having "only" 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes.

However, the 4 memory channels of Socket 2011 will probably significantly improve virtualisation performance.

[kalniel]

Or indeed Skt 1356

Should have guessed they wouldn't leave the Opteron 4100 etc. to keep all the cloud architecture wins

Still only a relatively narrow connection to the PCH though, I'd have thought that would be beefier given SSD progress. Guess you'd hook a controller off one of the CPU lanes.

[sloaney007]

anyone got any links to SB moboard comparisons so i can have a sneeky peek??? or are they not out yet??

[DanOln]

I just bought an i7-950 / gigabyte GA-X58A UD3R board. Should be arriving tomorrow. I had some crazy reasoning that the new-year sandy bridges weren't competing with these i7s, so I might as well beat the VAT increase.

Anyone want to tell me if I've been a complete moron? Suppose we won't know until the i5 2500k chip and board prices come out.

I'm currently on a 5-year old P4, so at any rate the machine's gonna seem like something from sci-fi.

[Phage]

I just bought an i7-950 / gigabyte GA-X58A UD3R board. Should be arriving tomorrow. I had some crazy reasoning that the new-year sandy bridges weren't competing with these i7s, so I might as well beat the VAT increase.

Anyone want to tell me if I've been a complete moron? Suppose we won't know until the i5 2500k chip and board prices come out.

I'm currently on a 5-year old P4, so at any rate the machine's gonna seem like something from sci-fi.

There's always something new coming out. That's a fine spec. A couple of years away you will be able to drop a dirt-cheap i7980 for an upgrade.

[DanOln]

There's always something new coming out. That's a fine spec. A couple of years away you will be able to drop a dirt-cheap i7980 for an upgrade.

Thanks for the reassurance!

[kalniel]

I just bought an i7-950 / gigabyte GA-X58A UD3R board. Should be arriving tomorrow. I had some crazy reasoning that the new-year sandy bridges weren't competing with these i7s, so I might as well beat the VAT increase.

Anyone want to tell me if I've been a complete moron? Suppose we won't know until the i5 2500k chip and board prices come out.

I'm currently on a 5-year old P4, so at any rate the machine's gonna seem like something from sci-fi.

Depends what you do with it If you're just gaming then you've been a moderate moron, but the difference between them compared to your old rig is not much.

[DanOln]

Depends what you do with it If you're just gaming then you've been a moderate moron, but the difference between them compared to your old rig is not much.

Java modelling. So hopefully worthwhile, if I can code some decent multi-threading, though the bit-tech review has an overclocked i5 2500k beating the i7 950 - and it appears the i5 can be overclocked on stock cooling pretty easily, from reading that. Though it doesn't say what the power consumption difference is for the overclock.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

java modeling or java programming?

[DanOln]

java modeling or java programming?

Economic(ish) modelling for PhD, java coding to do it. I can farm some of it off to grid computing, but there's nothing quite like having your own machine to turn stuff around and test it quickly.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

man that sounds good! get me a job their