Glad you made it through the previous pages. What happens if we put all of the CPUs at the same clockspeed and disable the turbo function. We will perform some basic tests to see how the young and the old perform clock for clock. 

Here's a rundown on the specs :

AMD 965BE/1090T@4ghz : 20 x 200HT, 2600NB speed and 4Gb DDR3 1600Mhz CL 8-8-8-24 1T

Intel QX9650@4Ghz : 10 x 400FSB, PL9 and 4Gb DDR3 1600Mhz CL 8-8-8-24 1T

Intel i760@4ghz : 20 x 200 Bclock, 4gb DDR3 1600Mhz CL8-8-8-24 1T

Intel 920/950 and 970@4Ghz : 20 x 200 Bclock , 3200 uncore and 6Gb DDR3 1600Mhz CL 8-8-8-24 1T

Sadly our i7 1156 system wasn't tested at 4ghz as it failed to boot. After numerous LN2 sessions the 875K  Lynfield gave in... RIP

I hope for some that there are no real surprises in the above specs. I would even refer to them, as possible daily 24/7 clocks. Enough with the chit chat. Starting off with the ram SuperPi test :

The new Sandy Bridge generation seriously ass-whooping all the competitors. Intel did one hell of a job here to even beat their current flagship ( which is no slouch either and famous for it's raw power ) SuperPi has never been AMD territory, maybe Bulldozer can finally change that...

SuperPi 32M shows the new technology improvements even better. Over 50secs gain over the I7 1366 CPUs. Who would have thought that a dual channel setup would ever beat triple channel ? Not even that Octopus would have ever picked that :p

Look at them speeds, now this is what we call über bandwidth. Again, not even the I7, our former bandwidth king of the last years can touch it. Heck it's not even coming close. Sandy bridge FTW !

Time for a Cinebench R10 64bit showdown :

Single core wise, the new "Sandies" are the best performers. Multi core wise they are just beaten by the Gulftown hexacore cruncher. For the other competitors, sorry lads, SB clearly dominates.

At the Tones Sandy Bridge brunch, lots of visitors asked me about the encoding performance of Intel's new born. Same story as with Cinebench, only Gulftown will be the weapon of choice for X264HD alike. Of course it all will depend a lot on your encoding software if 1155 or 1366 socket is preferred, or if it renders on your GPUs. This little bugger is no slouch at all ! Mainstream my ... ( fill in dirty word for booty on the dotted line please )

Let's throw a bunch of games at our humble overclocked CPUs. Sandy Bridge again right up in front of the pack. Take note that these are average FPS. Sometimes the minimum FPS was slightly higher on the 1366 platform. The DX11 Alien Vs Predator is completely GPU limited. Even the slowest CPU in our test manages to pump out a decent 75 FPS.

 The DirectX10 runs of Dirt 2 and Far Cry 2 put the new K CPU's right were they belong. On top of the charts. For gamers there's no need to cash out for a power-hungry 1366 socket equipped rig. At first I expected the Sandy Bridge lineup to be just a small evolution of the 1156 socket. Intel's engineers have really surprised this sceptic reviewer big time.