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
Gaming Performance
Gaming performance across the board echoes what we've already seen a lot of - the 3820 shows marginal gains over the 2600K.
Civilization V
Civ V's lateGameView benchmark presents us with two separate scores: average frame rate for the entire test as well as a no-render score that only looks at CPU performance.
Crysis: Warhead
Dawn of War II
DiRT 3
We ran two DiRT 3 benchmarks to get an idea for CPU bound and GPU bound performance. First the CPU bound settings:
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Tetracycloide - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I like the way you think.vectorm12 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
I doubt the extra PCI-e lanes have a tangible real-world benefit when gaming to be honest.However if you use the cards mainly for compute I in no way doubt there's potential for a massive performance increase to be had as shown by the 7970 review.
All in all I consider SNB-E to be a gigantic letdown as it really doesn't cater to enthusiasts as much as to workstation users.
Considering the cost of the platform I doubt one of the lower tier XEON platforms wouldn't be more cost-efficient in the long run, considering ECC RAM etc.
thunderising - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Was expecting more improvements from this TOCK of Intel'spiroroadkill - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Ivy Bridge is right round the corner. Is anyone really buying a new system at the moment?piroroadkill - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Obviously there's a place at the very high end for the 6-core part, but a 4-core part at this level is pointless. Anyone who wanted a system of this performance already bought a 2500 or 2600K and overclocked the balls off it, so for those people, nothing less than Ivy Bridge or beyond will do.Beats me.
AssBall - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well... This chip might get really interesting once we get the pricing numbers for Ivy Bridge. It is a solid chip I would consider if equivalent Ivy Bridge is priced high. I don't see any reason for Intel not to price Ivy Bridge highly either. They can compete with AMD on their lower end parts.Denithor - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Anyone who needs large amounts of RAM without the cost of 8GB sticks would be happy with this option. 8x4GB is much much cheaper than 4x8GB...Roland00Address - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
4gb sticks of ddr3 memory is about $3 to $4 dollars per gb8gb sticks of ddr3 memory is about $9 dollars per gb. These stick prices have gone down in price recently to much more reasonable levels.
Denithor - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well, even at that rate it's still a considerable savings:8x 4GB x $4/GB = $128
4x 8GB x $9/GB = $288
For a net savings of ~$160. Which, combined with the lower price on the chip, would completely offset the increased cost of the motherboard.
Plus, if 32GB just isn't enough, you could go 8x8GB which you simply cannot do on SB/IB setups (only ship with 4 physical RAM slots).
14ccKemiskt - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link
Well spoken!