Given the towering number of broken promises we've experienced over the years, we were naturally skeptical when Intel began giving us the hard-sell on its new "second-generation Core" processing platform (a.k.a., Sandy Bridge). Onboard graphics! Terrific with media! Better than Westmere! Upon testing one of Intel's first Sandy Bridge CPUs, the Core i7-2600K ($317 list), we were astonished to find that it mostly lived up to the hype. It's not legendary in the 3D department, but its media processing is superb, and in many ways it surpasses similarly priced predecessors from both Intel and AMD. The Core i7-2600K won't satisfy die-hard enthusiasts, but everyone else is likely to like this power-packed processor.
With four cores and eight threads (thanks to Intel's Hyper-Threading technology), the Core i7-2600K processor definitely occupies a position in the upper ranges of Intel's new Sandy Bridge line. It has a base clock speed of 3.4 GHz, but can go as high as 3.8 GHz when Turbo Boost is enabled; 8MB of L3 cache; and has a TDP of 95 watts. The K in the CPU's name means that, in addition to its latent power, it also has an unlocked multiplier for greater ease of overclocking. That makes this a chip that's geared toward wallet-watching enthusiasts who want a lot of the performance benefits of top-of-the-line Intel chips without the bank-account ache that can accompany splurging on something like a Core i7-980X. (If you don't care about overclocking, the regular Core i7-2600 will run you $294; you'll also have to cope with a lesser version of the video hardware, Intel HD Graphics 2000.)
View Slideshow See all (4) slides
Intel Core i7-2600K : CPU
Intel Core i7-2600K : Die Map
Intel Core i7-2600K : Box
Intel Core i7-2600K : Fan and Heat Sink
More
At least for now, even getting a reasonably priced Core i7-2600K will mean having to spring for a new motherboard as well. Though this chip is the part of the line that's the direct successor to Intel's last-generation "Westmere" family, it won't work in the same LGA1156 socket designed for that one—the new LGA1155 socket is what's required. As is some patience, particularly if you plan to upgrade in the future. The Core i7-2600K comes with a new fan–heat sink unit similar to the one introduced with the Core i7-980X last year, and that requires a special bracket to be installed underneath the motherboard; this is easy if you're assembling a system from scratch, but not if you want to replace a chip in one you've already built.
Depending on what you intend to do with the resulting system, the total purchase price and frustration may be a bargain. The Sandy Bridge CPUs represent some seismic technological shifts that have both introduced new capabilities and expanded or improved on the old ones. We've written a lot about what's new in Sandy Bridge, so we won't rehash those details here. We will say, however, that some of Intel's extravagant claims about Sandy Bridge's performance were more fact than fairy tale.
We saw some terrific performance from the Core i7-2600K in our basic performance tests, including a 12,088 overall score in Geekbench that ranks as the highest in this price class. (The six-core AMD Phenom II X6 1100T earned 9,488.) The same was true of our 1GB TrueCrypt 7.0 encryption test, with the Core i7-2600K taking the prize with a best-in-class speed of 195 MBps.
What Intel had told us about the Sandy Bridge chips' prowess plowing through media-centric chores was even more fully proven. Things started to look impressive with Cinebench R11.5 rendering test, where the 2600K earned 6.86 points—the highest we've seen for any CPU within this general price class. Likewise, a round with Futuremark's PCMark Vantage full-system benchmarking app produced results of 5,905 in the Memories (photo editing) test and 6,280 in TV and Movies—again, the highest we've seen in both categories.
The picture brightened still further with our more practical tests. Handbrake, ArcSoft Media Converter, and Cyberlink MediaShow Espresso, all made quick work of transcoding our test video file into one optimized for the Apple iPhone 4, respectively requiring 93, 59, and 26 seconds. Those results were as good as or better than what we saw with budget discrete graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia. The Core i7-2600K also smoked all comers in our Photoshop CS5 test, blasting through all 12 filters in 2 minutes 57 seconds. That's well beyond even what we've seen with six-core chips from both AMD (4 minutes 20 seconds for the Phenom II X6 1100T) and Intel (the Core i7-970, which costs upwards of $800, needed 3 minutes 37 seconds); the closest non–Sandy Bridge competitor we've seen was Intel's four-core Core i7-870, which still took 3 minutes 34 seconds. If you're big into photo and video work, the Core i7-2600K can give you one of the biggest boosts on the market.
This is not to say that game lovers will want to chuck their discrete cards, especially if they're of the high-end persuasion. As fine as the Core i7-2600K was at photo and video processing, it had more trouble getting over the hump in terms of 3D gaming. In Futuremark's 3DMark Vantage, its score of 11,583 is okay and its 2,173 rating is solidly unexceptional—at the Entry (1,024-by-768) and Performance (1,280-by-1,024) presets respectively. The average frame rates we saw in our 1,280-by-720 tests weren't much better with the Heaven Benchmark (13 frames per second), Lost Planet 2 (22.3 fps), or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (22.2 fps). Because, in every case, the Core i7-2600K alone can't even break the 30 fps barrier, you can expect some noticeable choppiness even at this very modest resolution. And because the CPU only supports DirectX 10.1 and not DX11, you won't be able to see all the brightest bells and whistles on newer titles, even at resolutions the chip can struggle through.
If Intel's Core i7-2600K isn't an ideal standalone gaming-graphics chip, that's about the only aspect of the platform's promise it doesn't fulfill. With double take–inspiring performance, particularly when media is involved, it's going to be nearly ideal for mainstream enthusiasts who want top capabilities without paying top dollar. It also represents a serious challenge for AMD, whose biggest-and-best desktop CPU lags well behind this one in many circumstances and only costs about $50 less. Because the platform has just been introduced and requires a new motherboard, the cost of entry may be high. But if this inaugural offering is any indication, it may just be worth it.
No comments:
Post a Comment