![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , January 03, 2011
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Intel Sandy Bridge 2600K & 2500K Processors Review
We take a look at Intel's soon to be in retail Sandy Bridge processors. We are going to specifically look at the 2500K and 2600K since these are Intel's only new overclockable processors and likely the only ones that you are concerned with.
Synthetics
Below are the usual suspects when it comes to synthetic benchmarks. We have updated SiSoft Sandra to the latest Free release of the software, so you should be able to play along at home.
Hiper Pi and wPrime have stayed the same to what we were previously using as both seem to still be very solid synthetic tools.
While you may or may not be a fan of synthetic benchmarks, these certainly have their places and it is always fun to see exactly how these line up with real world applications.
Light Blue = Stock Clocks / Dark Blue = Overclocks / Green = Phenom II 1100T Stock Clock
SiSoft Sandra - Dhrystone
I think the first thing that will jump out at your here is that the 2600K is a beast at both clock settings. It comes close to catching the 980X with its six cores at its stock settings. What I think stands out next is the fact that the 2500K pales in comparison with its lacking HyperThreading compared to the 2600K. The i7-920 at 3.6GHz is shamed by even the stock 2600K and tied up by the overclocked 2500K. And do keep in mind that the i7-655K is a dual core part that seems as if it was put in the mix to keep the Phenom II from coming in dead last.
SiSoft Sandra - Memory Bandwidth
Memory bandwidth graphing looks fairly boring until you wake up and see that the Sandy Bridge DDR3 memory controller on the dual channel parts is actually turning in better scores than the triple channel 980X part. The four core LGA1366 parts have always held the crown in this benchmark and do so once again, even at 1440MHz. Surely though, the dual channel Sandy Bridge memory controller is looking to be the bomb!
Hiper Pi
Hiper Pi is all about what part can find prime numbers the fastest. We set up this benchmark to be a single threaded application only. If we look at the 2600K at 4.4GHz and the 980X at 4.4GHz we see that the 2600K is actually much faster, by nearly a full second, and that is a pretty big deal in this benchmark. Now look at the 2500K at 4.3GHz; we see it surpass the 980X at 4.4GHz as well. IPC is looking to be very much improved on the Sandy Bridge parts.
wPrime
wPrime actually does square root calculations and then checks those; guess wSquareRoot was already taken.....
wPrime is set up to very much utilize all available cores and threads on our processors. So obviously we should see some big differences in scores.
Our overclocked 2600K is only outstripped by the six-core 980X at stock and 4.4GHz. The 2500K lacking HyperThreading,and therefore has 4 less threads exposed does not look as good in this benchmark, which makes sense. If we look at the 2600K compared to the i7-920 at 3.6GHz we see some solid performance. Interestingly, this is the first benchmark the Phenom II has not gotten "totally pwned" in.