Intel Sandy Bridge CPU In-Depth Look at Overclocking, Memory Timings and More

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2011-02-01

First introduced at the CES, Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPU architecture is here to flood the mainstream market with over 25 CPUs. Don't panic, most are foreseen for the mobile market and only 9 new models will be introduced for the desktop segment. Coinciding with this new release is also a new socket design. 1155 pins will be the new standard for Intel’s mainstream lineup. Yes you guessed it, Sandy bridge is here to replace socket 1156. Slowly but steadily Clarkdale and Lynnfield will become End Of Life and will be phased out. At the Sandy Bridge Tech conference the representatives of Intel said that the current S1366 i7 lineup (Bloomfield and Gulftown) will remain their high end platform. Time to explore Sandy Bridge...

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Stock clocks

Now let's see what Intel's latest generation has got to offer. Too bad we couldn't include the S1156 i7 875K CPU. As this is the socket, that 1155 Sandy Bridge will replace. Our 875K ES sample apparently decided to leave us unexpectedly, without a warning nor saying goodbye. As usual, our testing environment is a mix of synthetic and real life benchmarks. Let's get it going :

 

 

Wow, didn't really expect this kind of performance from what is referred as a mainstream platform. Intel's high end platform can't keep up. As a reminder the 2500K with Turbo function enabled can go up as high as 3.7Ghz, the 2600K up to 3.8Ghz. This all depending on the application load, thermal performance etc... For the AMD Thuban CPU we just enabled the Turbo function in the bios. Not pushed higher as some motherboards allow manual turbo intervention. This to keep the stock comparison as fair as possible. Compared to the S1156 Lynfield i760, the new features seems to provide a serious boost.

 

 

The two Sandy Bridge CPUs are SuperPi monsters. Over 100secs faster compared to the fastest 1366 CPU, our humble i970. The competitors just have to throw in the towel. There's no match (yet) for the "Sandies". Wprime is still ruled by the Gulftown CPU, thanks to its 12 thread capability. Maybe with a bit higher Turbo ratio the AMD 1090T could give a good showing here. But that's for later, when we test all CPUs at the same clock speeds. Till now jaw breaking performance of the 1155 platform !

 

We had to stop using Everest Ultimate Edition, as it was no longer updated. If we had used it for this review the graphs woulds be out of the margins of this page. We saw over 38K bandwidth. Luckily it's successor AIDA64 is here to save the day. No need for many words here. The Write, Read and Copy performance are out of this world. Bandwidth galore is not even the most suited expression. Imagine this technology, mixed with the 1366 socket : a lethal cocktail !

 

 

Techarps x264HD benchmark renders a 30 second High Definition clip into an x264 codec clip. Also supporting multithreading technology, making it an ideal benchmark for multi-core CPU's. The results are expressed in frames per second. Compared with the Bloomfield lineup (4 cores plus 4HT threads), even the 2500K ( only 4 cores ) still manages to render at least the same amount of frames per second. If we pop in the 2600K, we see the fastest platform in pass 1, pass2 is again Gulftown territory, benefiting more from the extra threads. But the 2600K retails at only a 3rd of the retail value of an 980X. Cheaper mobo's, dual channel ram solutions... and Intel still calls it a mainstream platform!

 

 

Cinebench R10's results are not different. Top notch performance in the single core thread ( over 300mhz-500 advantage here compared the other CPUs, due to the Turbo function ) But even the multi core rendering is blistering fast AMD's lineup is really getting hammered by Intel. I'm impressed by Sandy Bridge.

 

No this is not an error, the 3dMark01 results are fully correct. Maybe of less use to a daily user. But for the benching crowd this is really good news. The Core2 Duo S775 found its match. There's a new king in town lads for 3DMark01 benching. Even the 3DMark06 performance is quite good, especially looking at the score of the i970. Sandy Bridge seems to look as a solid game/benching platform. Let's take a look at the game tests :

 

 

We dropped the resolution to 1280 x 1024 and set the details to high or even very high for the older games. Why the lower resolution ? Just to be able to show the effect of a faster CPU in the game. If we put in a very high resolution,max detail and max texturing filtering the Graphics Card will become the bottleneck. Securing the top 2 spots, which is no surprise after all these tests.

 

 

 

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Comment from Teemto @ 2011/02/02
52x102 here with flares at 2176-6/9/6/24
SuperPi and Pifast stable.
Comment from leeghoofd @ 2011/02/02
So use these clocks too then for 3D Pascal
Comment from Teemto @ 2011/02/02
Yes my master.
Comment from thorgal @ 2011/02/03
So which settings did you use for 5Ghz It's those "just a few settings" that interest me

I always want to learn from a master
Comment from Stefan Mileschin @ 2011/02/04
Quote:
Originally Posted by Teemto View Post
Yes my master.
Is the system stable in 3DMark 2005 CPU test too at those frequencies?
Comment from Teemto @ 2011/02/04
Nope. That's realy the max I could go.
Haven't played around with the other voltages though.
Maybe Albrecht can shed some light if this could improve stability/OC'ability?

 

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