Intel Sandy Bridge-E - the new spearhead

One might almost think that it currently quite unilaterally is in the processor market. Intel had screwed up already powerful standard the first Sandy Bridge CPU at the beginning of the year. The flop of Zambezi CPUs recently released by AMD, however, was much worse. They should make better everything with its all-new design as the somewhat failed K10 design, however they subject their predecessors ultimately part and was beyond the power of good and evil. But therefore it should be today do not, we turn the latest addition of Intel to namely - the Sandy Bridge I/o processors.

 

Without question, the normal models already deliver very high performance, but still the icing on the cake was missing. Something like at that time already the socket LGA1366 with its Bloomfield and Bloomfield representatives. And we get just that today also delivered. A powerful new base, the LGA2011, a new chipset, and also a handful of new processors that are intended to represent the absolute spearhead in the desktop market.

 

As can be seen already on behalf of the basic design remains the same and so not much changes to the current "Tock". Sandy Bridge-E is based on a design that is manufactured in the 32 nanometer process as well as the little brothers and sisters. At the beginning there will be various models with four or six cores and a comparatively large L3 cache - this will be the usual Division into normal, "unlocked" and "Extreme" versions, which are indicated by small tags to the name.

Certainly, not all of the new base will enjoy as an easily upgrades over the years is not possible and by the mainboard change is also significantly more expensive. After all, it comes with a few new features, because for the first time here there will be boards, which can simultaneously address all four memory channels. In English it is "Quad-Channel Support" then to itself. For the absolute high end platform, there are still 40 PCIe lanes for a great graphics card network, only with USB 3.0 ports is lacking somewhat, but more on that later.

Now but enough pulp to the hot talked. The top model of the new series against the established competition in the form of a core i7-2600K may claim in the current test. Due to the lack of time, more extensive tests were not possible, be rescheduled as soon as possible.