Comments Locked

84 Comments

Back to Article

  • horangl3e - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    So if a user were to buy two graphics cards, the gtx 580 for example, would it be more beneficial for that user to use the X79 platform instead of the Z68? Currently I believe that the user would have to split between x8 x8 for each graphics card if they used the non X79 platform but with the X79 both cards would be able to use the proper x16 bandwith for both graphics cards right?
  • chizow - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    There's not much benefit when using 2xPCIE 2.0 single-GPU cards with PCIE 2.0 x8 slots. They just don't need that much bandwidth.

    With multi-GPU cards however, that PCIE 2.0 x8 starts to choke them a bit and x16 starts showing its benefits.

    Another thing to keep in mind too is that with X79 (and IB?) they support PCIE 3.0, so with PCIE 3.0 cards, PCIE 3.0 x8 is the equivalent of PCIE 2.0 x16 in terms of bandwidth. Should be beneficial for multi-card solutions especially with multi-GPU cards.

    I'm assuming Ivy Bridge will also be PCIE 3.0 compliant, but if not, X79 might be even more appealing to people looking to buy the next-gen GPU offerings from AMD/Nvidia.

    Also, Anand or anyone else, since the PCIE controllers are on the CPU dies now, is it possible for SB to support PCIE 3.0 as well? Or are they just too different?
  • B3an - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Sandy Bridge could never support PCI-E 3.0 without a pretty major revision to the CPU's. Even then i'm not sure if the motherboards would actually work with it.

    If i was buying a quad core right now i would actually go for this i7 3820 over a 2500 - 2700K. Simply because it's more future proof for graphics cards. While no card needs more than x16 PCI-E 2.0 right now for games they certainly will in the future. Plus with SNB-E you can run two cards at x16 @ PCI-3.0 speed, but with SB it's only x8 @ 2.0 speed which already takes a slight performance hit with current cards. The graphics upgrade path for SNB-E will last for years to come.
  • Tchamber - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I have a Gulftown i7, and doesn't it support PCIe at 16x16? I didn't know Intel took a step back with SNB and PCIe lanes for multi GPUs. Do I understand this right?
  • SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I believe with Gulftown the PCI-E Controller is not based on the CPU. Thats why you can get 16x16x8 with them.
  • SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    By based of course I mean located.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    LGA1366 supports 32 PCIe 2.0 lanes. That is more than LGA 1155's 16, but LGA 1155 isn't the official successor to 1366 (even if SB is fast enough it's quads beat 1366 hexes on many benches); it's the LGA 1156 replacement and 11556 also only has 16 2.0 lanes. LGA 2011 replaces LGA 1366 (and LGA 1567 on high end Xeons); and is a major PCIe upgrade.
  • dgingeri - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Actually, the x58 chipset supports 36 lanes from the northbridge and 6 more form the southbridge: http://www.intel.com/Assets/Image/diagram/X58_bloc...

    This allows three slots using x16/x16/x4 with 6 more for expansion devices or x16/x8/x8 with 10 more for expansion devices. (My P6T is the former while my Rampage III Formula is the latter. Yes, I have 2 lga1366 systems, one a server and one a gaming machine.)

    The 40 lanes from the processor and the 8 lanes from the chipset will be a big boost for using certain devices. I'll be able to run both my video cards at x16 while still using my 10Gbe and LSI RAID cards with x8 slots. :)
  • chizow - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    SNB/P67/Z68 was the successor to the short-lived Lynnfield/Clarkdale P55-based platforms.

    SB-E/X79 is the direct successor to Nehalem/Gulftown/X58.

    Intel has just had the luxury of pushing back the release dates of their parts because no matter what they sell, its faster than AMD and still netting them boatloads of cash.

    So yes, for some time Intel's leading CPUs have been behind on the platform side of things, SB-E settles the balance and represents an upgrade over Nehalem in every aspect.

    This will change again however with IVB, which will be on a smaller process node and probably swing the clockspeed, Turbo, overclocking, and power consumption considerations back in favor of the weaker P67/Z68 platform.

    The main difference however is that IVB will also support PCIE 3.0 so the fewer PCIE lanes will be less of a disadvantage on cards that support PCIE 3.0 when used in multi-GPU configs.
  • Kevin G - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Ivy Bridge will be supported on current socket 1155 motherboards. It'll bring PCI-E 3.0 but currently motherboards are going to be hit or miss if they support that speed. Intel won't officially support PCI-E 3.0 withe P67/Z68 (and related) chipsets but motherboard manufacturers can take that burden if they choose.

    The main reason to go with socket 2011 isn't a single GPU but rather running multiple GPU's that'll need that bandwidth. For gaming, the performance difference is only a few percentage points. For GPGPU, the difference is greater but if that is the target market, then using a multi-socket 2011 motherboard populated with Xeons is more likely. That'd allow for four PCI-E 16x and two PCI-E 8x lanes all at 3.0 speeds.

    For the majority of consumers, socket 1155 will remain good enough for 2012.
  • keristerzt - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Of course, the X79 is support up to 40 lanes, that means you got native 16x16x bandwidth for both cards, this is a great deal, plus it has impressed me by it 4-channel of memory, brings up the bandwidth to 51.2GB/s
  • tech6 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    As you can see by the benchmarks, the extra PCI and memory bandwidth will make no difference to your gaming experience whatsoever. Games simply don't require more than SB delivers. However, if you want to be the first kid on your street that has a SB-E then go for it.
  • MySchizoBuddy - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Compute will benefit from it. best option for compute is for 8 full x16 PCI-e.
    tyan provides a motherboard with those features for Compute servers.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    The benches anand did are meaningless for a GPU comparison. Where LGA2011 might perform better is on 3/4 GPU setups, but these numbers are for a single 5870.
  • cactusdog - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    This is why Intel didnt release the quad core 3820 with the initial launch of SB-E. It gives us an easy comparison with the 2600K and it highlights just how poor SB-E performs when compared to normal SB.

    I've always been a supporter of the highend but its hard to like SB-E unless you're prepared to spend $600-$1000 on a 6 core CPU, even then it aint great.

  • SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Not sure I agree with that, It does slightly better in the benchmarks and the 6 core CPU's for 600$ sounds about right to me.
  • Taft12 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    If you think $600 for a 6-core CPU sounds about right, you're going to lose your shit when I show you the Phenom II X6 prices!
  • nevertell - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Well, you're going to lose your shit when I tell you that they are discontinuing all the stars based phenom II x6 processors.
  • iLLz - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I'm not going to lose anything! The Penom II x6 performs worse than Intels Quad Cores so pffft!
  • SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Then you're going to lose your shit when you see this 280$ CPU beating the crap out of the Phenom II X6.

    Seriously lets keep it in context here. Thats like saying I can buy 6 atom CPU's for 50$ so paying for a phenom is too much.
  • Hrel - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    So, shouldn't there be a price cut coming on 2700k, 2600k and other similar CPU's? If not Intel is being a dick again.
  • SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Well no, There is no quick synk ( I believe) no IGP. it should be a cheaper chip.
  • SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Without a IGP I guess there couldn't be quick synk. So forget the (I believe) part
  • Tetracycloide - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    So they're adding an IGP most users of the k series CPUs don't want, need, or use, charging them for it, and that means no, they're not a dick? I'm not following. I mean if this is really the reason to keep the current pricing on those SKUs then there's really no other option: Intel is being a dick again.
  • Tetracycloide - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Well, in fairness to Intel they're being a dick by offering this product at a pretty astonishingly low price for what's on offer which just makes their other SKUs look overpriced by comparison.
  • SlyNine - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    How so, many people want Quick synk which REQUIRES the IGP. So explain how Intel is being a dick?

    Besides, Like there is a way for Intel to remove the IGP. Be practical or go home.
  • SaltwaterC - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link

    Food for thought ... http://ark.intel.com/compare/52213,52276,52277,522...
  • chizow - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I haven't followed SB-E that closely but I figured the 4-core derivative would be a badly cut down (reject) version of the 8-core chip, basically the dregs of the wafer basically cut down to half usable.

    Can't believe they went with an entirely new die that still benefits from the greater 2.5MB L3 amount per core. It should actually perform better than the 3930K in cases that use 4 cores or less.....amazing. Intel couldn't have made this chip only to become a $280 desktop part....are they planning to use it for their low-end servers as well?

    This also really provides that budget friendly high-end part for X79, basically the successor to the i7-920 for entry level enthusiasts. X79 still has its glaring omissions (USB 3.0, limited SATA6G, no Thunderbolt etc) but the 3820 makes it look better compared to SB and even IB.

    $285 is an amazing price point.....I fully expect to see it for $199 at Micro Center a month from now. :) I wonder if there will be a K edition.....
  • Kevin G - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I was figuring that the 4 core version was a cut down 8 core version too. I suspect that there will still be some of the 8 core dies being sold at 4 core just to get rid of inventory (OEM only parts perhaps?).

    I figure the reason for a native 4 core die is so that they can lower power consumption even further. Even with a completely disabled core, there is still some additional power consumption due to the internal ring bus. Speaking of which, I wonder if the reduction in hops in the internal ring bus will have any noticeable impact on performance anywhere (lower L3 cache latencies ect?).

    The other reason for a native 4 core die is likely for high clock speed or ultra low power Xeon parts. There is a little known 4.4 Ghz dual core Xeon for socket 1366. It wouldn't surprise me if all the chips that test for high clock speeds are binned for a similar Xeon and not Core i7 3820's. :(

    Though if we're lucky many of the X79 motherboards will work with the socket 2011 Xeon's.
  • Denithor - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Low end servers would be my guess as well. All that memory bandwidth, PCIe lanes, perfect for applications where massive quantities of RAM (along with high speed access to it) is more important than raw cpu power.

    Seems like they ran an article on Facebook's server farms where FB uses AMD systems for RAM caching even though the cpu performance was much, much lower in the same power envelop simply because the AMD systems had more RAM sockets. This would seem like a direct replacement for those kind of systems.
  • 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's
  • piroroadkill - 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 gb
    8gb 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!
  • Roland00Address - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link

    Yes the memory is cheaper (about $160). It is not "much much cheaper" (your words) anymore.

    An i7 2600k is $299 at amazon.com and newegg with free shipping and no tax in many states. That is a difference of +15 compared to the speculated price of 285 for the core i7 3820 (so a total of +175 for memory and cpu)

    x79 motherboards cost between $215 to $470 on newegg. Cheapest board with 8 ram slots is $280

    p67 motherboards cost between $95 to $310 on newegg
    z68 motherboards cost between $90 to $340 on newegg

    So you may save $175 on cpu and memory but you are going to spend another $100 ish on the motherboard making your savings less than a 100 dollars. A hundred dollars is not a small amount but we are probably talking all said and done talking about a computer that is going to cost between $1000 and $1500 to build, thus a 100 dollars is between 6 to 10% of the computer price.

    There is a reason to get the x79 chipset, but if you are getting it due to memory, please do it so you can use you 64 GBs of memory instead of a mere 32. Do it for that reason or do it for the 6 core cpus, the pci-e . Do not get a x79 chipset just so you can go cheap on the memory and only get 32 GBs.

    Do not wait another 3 months so you can save a small amount on memory.
  • Ammaross - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Article: "If you're seriously considering anything in the SNB-E family, the latter [Ivy Bridge] isn't going to matter and the former will be of arguable value"
    piroroadkill: "Anyone who wanted a system of this performance already bought a 2500 or 2600K and overclocked the balls off it..."

    With tri-gate, die-shrink, and small bump in performance, IVB will be a nice setup due to being highly overclockable (I hope!). If SNB can OC to ~4.5 on air (running 4.4 on my rig), IVB with die shrink would hopefully manage something approaching 5ghz (remember, tri-gate does a better job with power flow and reception at lower voltage or higher speeds...). And the pricing lineup has already been leaked and shows fairly similar pricing to SNB launch, so I'm just sitting on my hands until April.
  • p05esto - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I've got an i7 940 system and skipped SB and SB-E, but Ivy is my upgrade plan at the moment. SB-E let me down, so I'm waiting till April now. And even then, my i7 940 on SSD does everything I need it to do and FAST..... it's just an upgrade itch that needs to be scratched every couple years (we're suckers perhaps).
  • Coup27 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    On the chipset block diagram, it says PCI Express 2.0 is branching off the CPU and also the chipset? Shouldn't that be 3?
  • darckhart - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Yes that confused me a bit as well. Or is that pcie v3.0 only off the cpu and v2.0 off the x79?
  • deruberhanyok - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Every time I see the "i7 3xxx" number I get excited and think someone got an early Ivy Bridge sample.

    Then I remember that Intel couldn't even stick to their own naming convention for two generations of the Core iX series. :(
  • p05esto - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    No kidding, that crap pisses me off. Why is so damn hard to come up with a simple naming convention that is intuitive and can be used for decades? Doesn't have to be fancy, they could prefix the convention with some silly name like Pentium, Core i7 or whatever but then give the freaking thing some letter/number designation that clearly shows what is what. I could come up with 10 different numbering schemes without even trying!
  • descendency - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Yeah. I don't get why they can't just name things like

    i3s...2100,2150,2200,2250

    i5s... 2300, 2350, 2400, 2450

    i7 (1155)...2500, 2550, 2600, 2650

    i7 (2011)... 2700, 2750, 2800, 2850

    with Extreme chips being 2900 X...

    add in K, X, S and whatever other letters you want at the end

    Then, when Ivy Bridge comes out, change those 2s to 3s... Oh. and when Haswell comes out... make those 3s into 4s... maybe even have an i3 2270 when you want to sell the better binned chips at a higher price.
  • dj christian - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    I don't get it, why would you sell the i3 2270 at a higher price? The SB is in it's way out..
  • descendency - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I know it would be expensive, but it would be nice occassionally to get a review of an entire platform and what is possible on it.

    For example, what FPS could you get in 6 monitor setups with 4x GPUs on SNB-E vs SNB. (or something like that)

    How much does extra ram really benefit in those kinds of applications.

    It just doesn't make sense to review all CPUs on even planes because all CPUs are not designed to do what some CPUs are and that's why they are 500-1000 dollars each.
  • ytoledano - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I'm in desperate need of memory. I bought the 3930K with 48GB as soon as it was released. If the 3820 was available then I would have gotten it and saved the cash for more memory. I guess this chip is useful for those just looking for SB-E features like 8 slot 4 channel memory or the PCI-E channels.
  • Taft12 - Sunday, January 1, 2012 - link

    One day guys like you will learn Xeon/Opteron workstation platforms exist and really aren't all that expensive.
  • futurepastnow - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    #4: You need a new PC right now and can't afford a 6-8 core CPU but would like to upgrade later.
  • hechacker1 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Somewhat true. I have an i7 920, and would love to upgrade to a Gulftown 6-core now that is considered old.

    However, the price isn't coming down. It seems to be stuck at around $550 despite lower priced 4 core processors performing better at low threaded benchmarks.

    So it may make sense to just pay the price for the 6 core version if you really need it. Unless you are ready to go very long term in waiting for the price to come down.

    I imagine when Ivy-E comes out (with 8 cores?) perhaps then the old 6-core processors will finally get real cheap.
  • piroroadkill - Monday, January 2, 2012 - link

    Unlikely. This upgrade path is ridiculous - it gives you a 4 core CPU that is effectively a wasted investment, hoping that the 6 cores come down.

    Go check out the best CPUs in socket 775 - Q9550, Q9650, and maybe the fabled Q9550S with its lower TDP.

    These things are still ridiculously expensive, and won't budge because people want the best on their old platform.
  • CW1 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link


    "This also really provides that budget friendly high-end part for X79, basically the successor to the i7-920 for entry level enthusiasts. X79 still has its glaring omissions (USB 3.0, limited SATA6G, no Thunderbolt etc) but the 3820 makes it look better compared to SB and even IB."

    The 3820 is essentially the Sandy Bridge's i7-920. With what benchmarks I can find, it appears the 2600 runs around 10% faster than the i7-920 and with the 3820 running a few % faster than the 2600, I just don't see good reason to upgrade my aging i7-920 just yet. Perhaps we can convince Anand to compare the i7-920 to the new 3820...

    Sure, 32gb of memory would be great! The cost of that memory is a large page file size and a large hibernation size. Using recommended page file size, that's 64gb of precious SSD space!!
  • hechacker1 - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I know it's possible to easily relocate the swap file, but I think you're right, you can't easily move the hiberfil.sys.

    But then I rarely hibernate my desktop PC. It goes into S3 sleep, which is IMHO, good enough. Unless you are prone to frequent power outages.
  • peterfares - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Manually set the page file size then. There is no need to waste all that space on a page file that will rarely get used. I have 8GB in my laptop with a 128GB SSD. I set the page file to only 2GB.
  • CW1 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link

    Yeah, that's why I said "recommended". Although I've got 12gb ram and still have my page size set to 12gb. When my SSD starts running low on space I'll shrink it down.

    You could relocate the pagefile to a differnet drive, but it's something you'd want on an SSD. :)

    Regardless, Intel hasn't provided any real incentive to upgrade my i7-920. I was really hoping that SandyBridge-E would be my next upgrade (I've got the itch!), but it looks like Ivy Bridge will be it.

    Unfortunately, this appears a result of no real competition for Intel other than within itself. There's nothing to push the price of performance down. AMD has become all but forgotten. Unless they make a big splash in the CPU market their market share will continue to dwindle. It's unfortunate...all my machines have switched to Intel...the last AMD was a x2 250 for my htpc. With Sandy Bridge, I finally upgraded that machine so I could use the onboard GPU.
  • dj christian - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    You shouldn't shrink the pagefile when your's SSD is running low on space. Trust me!
  • 14ccKemiskt - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    Exactly. The original line-up for the enthusiast platform (LGA1366) was 920 ($280),940 ($560), 965 ($999). That has since then gradually transformed (by price level)

    ~$280: 920 > 930 > 950 > 960 > 3820
    ~$560: 940 > 950 > 960 > 970 > 980 > 3930K
    ~$999: 965 > 975 > 980X > 990X > 3960X

    The big "winner" on the enthusiast platform(s) is the $560 part that has gone from being a locked quad-core 2.9 GHz chip to a unlocked hex-core 3.2 GHz one.

    But it is fair that the 920 has got it's successor. And if you want a lot of RAM, don't need the internal graphics or want the option to upgrade your cpu, the LGA2011+3820 is as good a choice as the LGA1155+2700K. Remember that we may well see a octa-core IVB-E within a year or so and LGA2011 will be the only platform to put it into.
  • rgallant - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    have a I7-920 and 2 x 580 ,+ 2 x gtx 285's laying around.
    -down the road might want to use a 3rd card , either a 580 or a gtx 285[phsyx]
    -so sb = x8,x4,x4 pci-e 2.0
    -so ib = x8,x4,x4 pci-e 2.0 - need all 3.0 cards for x8,x4,x4 pci-e 3.0

    -so 40 lanes look's better to me , not = to sb\ib.
    -come Jan.09 hope to see some sb benches with 2 x 7970 and a 3rd card at x8,x4,x4, and at x8+x8 ,then some 2 x x16 3.0 + x8 on a 79x system.
    -ib will not have a nv200 chip to give more lanes , as it's does not do pci-e 3.0.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, December 29, 2011 - link

    I'd be shocked if nVidia doesn't luanch a PCIe 3.0 successor to the nv200...
  • dj christian - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    I did not understand a thing what you just wrote
  • tpi2009 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link

    Hi Anand,

    could you tell uss what is the latency of 10 MB L3 cache in the i7 3820 ? From the 3960X review the latency for the i7 3930K and 3960X were a bit higher compared to Sandy Bridge, given their bigger size, and also the main memory acess lantecy was also higher .

    Given that the i7 3820 is not an eight core chip with disabled cores and cache, I was wondering what latency does the cache and main memory access have ? Close to Sandy Bridge ? Close to the i7 3930K and 3960X ?

    Thanks!
  • HMTK - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link

    Looks like a nice cheap CPU for a virtualization setup if it has all the necessary hardware activated.
  • SunLord - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link

    Just looking at that transistor count pretty much shows exactly why AMD isn't as good as Intel they keep failing at trying to do more with less. They'd probably have far better luck trying to do more in the same amount of transistors
  • Hauk - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link

    Now for the release date..?
  • murray13 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link

    Your 'niche' posit has one big flaw. Not everyone builds a new system every year or even 18 months. Those of us that only build new systems every 3 to 4 years are more looking at the platform and it's longevity than the single generation cpu gains.

    If someone wants to build a system (in the next couple of months) and needs it to last for 3 or 4 years, LGA2011 sure looks a lot better than LGA1155 does, at least with the current z68 chipset. That may change with the 7x chipset upgrade coming with IVB.

    So for me the real question is do I build when the 3820 comes out or do I wait and build when IVB comes out, assuming IVB brings with it a 7x chipset...

    I'm leaning heavily right now on LGA2011. Maybe I'm one of those 'niche' people.
  • descendency - Saturday, December 31, 2011 - link

    Nah. Anand is right. The performance gap between SBE and SB isn't big enough in the vast majority of applications (especially consumer applications, ie games). 3-4 years or not.

    You will only see a performance gap increase at the ultra high end of the markets. Regardless of what year it is. So unless you are predicting that in the next 3-4 years, the ultra high end needs today become the midrange needs of tomorrow (something I would say, from a software engineer's perspective, is far from likely), I'd suggest you buy an SB instead of an SBE.

    I'm running a 3 year old AMD system fine. (speaking of which... might be time to upgrade lol)
  • murray13 - Saturday, December 31, 2011 - link

    But the rub is, IF your looking at building a system soon, what's the advantage of buying SB over SB-E, other than saving $ on the mb and maybe ram?

    I've spec'd out systems both ways and they're within 10% of each other (when the 3820's out).

    What your saying is that applications won't take advantage of the new hardware even in 3-4 years, they said that 3-4 years ago, too. Today, some are starting to take advantage.

    I'm running a 4 year old Intel system that would probably wax the floor with yours and it IS time for me to upgrade...lol.
  • vol7ron - Sunday, January 1, 2012 - link

    this looks interesting but won't ivy bridge be out around the same time?
  • Denithor - Monday, January 2, 2012 - link

    The one advantage SB-E offers over IB is more RAM. At max IB will offer 4x8GB or 32GB (and expensive, those 8GB sticks aren't cheap) while SB-E with its 8 slots will hold up to 8x8GB or 64GB.
  • soultraveler - Monday, January 2, 2012 - link

    Just wondering if i should just upgrade my 920 cpu and stay on the 1366 platform now seeing as gaming performance hasn't changed much in the past few years. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.
  • DarkStryke - Tuesday, January 3, 2012 - link

    Save your money till Ivybridge. SB-E is a waste of money, and a heavily neutered platform chipset currently (x79 was promised with much more then the garbage it ended up being rolled out as).
  • dj christian - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link

    Why isn't this diss board connected to the forums? I can't keep track off my posts or replies.
  • binqq - Friday, January 6, 2012 - link

    Our Website: ===== www fashion-long-4biz com ====
    Our main product list is as follows:
  • Artifex28 - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link

    I am a digital composer and hardcore gamer.

    My current E6750 @ 3.2GHz has certainly outlived itself and I am looking to upgrade my setup soon.

    For gaming purposes, I suppose 3820 would be enough. But I am not sure about the digital composing (DAWs, mixing, sample libraries etc). I am aiming for 24-32GB RAM opposed to the 8 GB I got now. Any thoughts if I should wait for Ivy Bridges or not?

    www.soundcloud.com/Artifex28
  • Denithor - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link

    IB probably worth the wait. You will be able to use either 4x8GB (32GB) or 2x8GB + 2x4GB (24GB) with IB. Throw in a nice low power quad and you'll be loving it.

    SBE would save you like $100-150 because you could go with 8x4GB (32GB). Or you could hit 64GB if you really needed that much RAM.
  • Artifex28 - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link

    Thanks Denithor.

    One more vote for waiting! :)
  • fteoath64 - Thursday, May 24, 2012 - link

    The 3820 is perfect for your needs and I doubt IB boards will come with 4ch RAM or they were 2011 sockets will be over $500 and very similar performance. An overclocked 3820 according to Overclocked site is the fastest processor out there!. They had their 5Ghz on air but I think 4.7Ghz will kick anything else except for an over-clocked hexacore!.
  • nyran125 - Saturday, January 21, 2012 - link

    Anyone who has a 2500K or 2600K would have to be off thier rocker to buy this CPU for the price its asking for.
  • metro_2020 - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link

    these intel man and company are blood sucker mother f....r. god why not they sell them self to suck money of people go to hell.
  • Twisp - Friday, April 8, 2022 - link

    I bought this CPU in part thanks to this review. After 10 years still going strong I am finally feeling the bottleneck and looking for an upgrade. I've been through many GPUs several PSUs and cooling systems and memory, all that is original is this bad boy and the P9X79LE I slapped it in. The system has been remarkably stable and felt competitive for many years, only falling off in the last five years or so. Thanks for the review!

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now