Review: Sandy Bridge Core 2011 processors from Intel

FutureMark tests

PCMark Vantage

PCMark Vantage is a suite of tests designed to give an easily reproducible result. It is also often used for bragging rights. The suite combines some of the most common PC tasks into an easy to use format.

Here we find some excellent scores for the people that like the synthetic side of computer testing. This could be an indication of good things to come in our later real-world testing as well.

3DMark 11

3DMark 11 is the second in the twin tests from FutureMark.  This one turns to gaming. It is one of the first tests to use DX11 for the rendering loops. However, FutureMark moved away from the use of the proprietary PhysX and are using a much more brand neutral flavor. This test offers us a glimpse into how a CPU will perform with a discrete GPU dropped in.

It is hard to tell what if anything this means to the average user. The 3DMark scores appear to be right in line for the range of CPU and GPU we are testing here but we will need more data to give you a firm conclusion.

Cinebench R11.5

This test from Maxon improves threading efficiency (up to 64 threads) over the older R10 and also includes some advanced rendering techniques to keep the CPU working hard. CB R11.5 also includes a revamped OpenGL test for GPU performance.

Both of the new Sandy Bridge CPUs do very well here even if they are not at the top. We would still have liked to see some better performance here, but it was just not to be.

HyperPi 0.99

HyperPi is a great test to find out how well a CPU can handle large amounts of math based information. With HyperPi you have a single instance of SuperPi Mod 1.3 running on each logical and physical core. This puts a great deal of stress on the CPU and also on the internal memory controller.

HyperPi is tough on a CPU, it is even more tough on a CPU that has Hyper Threading. When that is on each Physical CPU core is trying to run dual instances of a Pi calculation out to 32 million places.  The fact that the HT enabled Core i7 2600K does so well is very impressive and leads us to think we might see some great performance in rendering and transcoding as well.

Photoshop CS5 tests

Photoshop is an industry standard image manipulation application. It is great for not only editing photographs but also for creating original content. For out testing here we used the Driverheavn Photoshop script. This is a custom built action that puts a stock image through a series of filters and allows you to record the time each takes to run.

Wow, look at those times! The stock Core i7 2600K is even faster than a Core i7 980X! Now that is what I call an improvement.