I'm upgrading my current setup (in sig) to the 2600K as Kentsfield getting on now. Demanding games like Bad Company 2, GTA4, maybe Blops, etc.. is using 80%+ of my quadcore. Plus the bandwidth is measured at only 8.5GBps compared to my PC2-6400CS2 DDR2 ram of 12.8GBps. The CPUs limitation is noticeable in the framerates of Fraps on the more than capable 5970. Most games are played on High @1920x1200 with exception of the games listed above that hammer my framerates down to 30fps on busy environments - think of it like annoying online GPU lag.
Upgrading to the revised i7 2600K will mean higher framerates, and about 25GBps bandwidth which will come useful for HD movie rendering. The overclocking potential is meant to be much better from the review released on the 3rd January. There is a basic guide to get the Core i5-2500K to 4.5GHz on bit-tech which is much better than I thought was possible with Sandy Bridge. The average overclock on all the reviews read so far suggest 4.5GHz is easy to achieve - the highest I've seen is on bit-tech that managed 4.9GHz on i5-2500K, and 4.85GHz on i7-2600K. That means at those clocks, the max framerate beats a £820+ 980x @4.4GHz plus it uses only half the power! With liquid cooling it may be possible to reach 5GHz without resorting to the dangerous LN2 used just for benches. This all means for the games that require a higher CPU frequency than additional cores can manage to sustain higher min/max framerates before turning it into a slideshow.
I'm hoping OCUK will offer a decently priced SB oc bundle of at least 4.4GHz otherwise I will try it myself. Just for peoples info, the memory accepted is usually max of 16GB of dual channel DDR3 1066MHz, 1333MHz, 1600MHz, or 2133MHz.
Reckon i'll jump on board before my current parts depreciate in price so much that it would cost me a lot more to upgrade in the future.
