• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

SB-E Review

Liampope said:
Omm nom i guess. So maybe a future all 8 cores enabled 22nm IB version would make a decent upgrade for my i5 750? Or is it wait for Haswell by then?

And will there be a game that makes use of it?
Click to expand...
Nobody knows when ivy-e will arrive, if we go off the current sb-e release it will arrive 5-6 months before the mainstream goes haswell, potentially rendering it useless depending on how well haswell performs.

The last two cores are apparently disabled to keep tdp/grade in order. Though some will be defects too. As Ivy brings power down considerably we have the potential for 8 cores under a 130w tdp.

Some games currently use up to 8 or 16 threads like supreme commander but outside of productivity work there are few games that are that highly threaded right now.
 
man i was looking forward to SB-E but with the prices that the new boards and chips are vs my current setup I'll be giving it a big miss, u would have to be mad to trade your 2600k setup for one

Think Intel have shot them selfs in the foot with the 2011 socket

mind u liking the prices of the quad channel memory so will getting me a 16gb 2133 kit
 
I'm impressed by these new Sandy Bridge CPU's but really can't get excited about it as even though its a faster then its predecessor I find myself asking 'So what?'. It's not like the consumer and arguably a lot of enthusiasts need this sort of CPU anymore, games need a good video card for performance and more and more apps are turning towards the RISC based GPU designs which can do a lot better job at transcoding, rendering etc then a CPU which might cost a lot more.

The future of CPU's isn't with these 130 watt behemoths but with low power chips like we see from ARM. Just look at the quality of graphics on the games you can play on a the Transformer 2 tablet its just amazing what you do with a handful of watts. The lack of competition for the past 5 years at the high has also made this less interesting.
 
Freddie1980 said:
The future of CPU's isn't with these 130 watt behemoths but with low power chips like we see from ARM.
Click to expand...

I totally agree. I was just reading an article about an ARM based supercomputer that is being built. In it, NVidia says

ARM’s superior energy efficiency can be traced back to the origins of the ARM architecture. While ARM was originally designed for extremely small and low power embedded devices, Intel and AMD x86 CPUs were always trying to make the Windows operating system run faster with little consideration for power consumption.
Click to expand...

So it's Windows that's to blame for PCs being so energy hungry :D
 
Freddie1980 said:
The future of CPU's isn't with these 130 watt behemoths but with low power chips like we see from ARM. Just look at the quality of graphics on the games you can play on a the Transformer 2 tablet its just amazing what you do with a handful of watts. The lack of competition for the past 5 years at the high has also made this less interesting.
Click to expand...

Absolutely true. The current trend is towards mobile computing/devices, and that`s what IvyBridge is aiming to cater for - low power, scalable performance.

How that`ll translate in comparison performance-wise to SB-E remains to be seen. I think for productivity applications SB-E on 2011 is a safe bet looking ahead to IB-E.

For games on the other hand, there`s clearly very little point in going down SB-E / 2011 route..
 
Cabbages2011 said:
Absolutely true. The current trend is towards mobile computing/devices, and that`s what IvyBridge is aiming to cater for - low power, scalable performance.

How that`ll translate in comparison performance-wise to SB-E remains to be seen. I think for productivity applications SB-E on 2011 is a safe bet looking ahead to IB-E.

For games on the other hand, there`s clearly very little point in going down SB-E / 2011 route..
Click to expand...

It's not just games though, pretty much every other application a home consumer could want a computer for doesn't need SB-E the only other sectors you could want it in are servers and 3D rendering but even there its more efficient to invest in a Quadro/FirePro video card then a £700 CPU. Computer apllications these days are steering aware from serial processing computation and back to parallel where Intel really doesn't have much to offer.

The point is were now at a point where the home consumer doesn't really need any more CPU performance until high end industry applications start to come down to consumer level (3D printing for the home user perhaps in 20 years?) there won't be much demand for more performance.
 
beejjacobs said:
My understanding was that the X58 and now the X79 are not really for gamers? I mean an i5 2500K is generally more than enough for gaming.
Click to expand...
I suppose it depends also how many screens one uses in gaming, nvidia surround needs some power to play some games at highest settings i would imagine?.

Geforce.com report some people are not really interested in reaching a happy medium between value and performance. Instead, their sole passion is building the fastest PC possible. These are the serious hardware enthusiasts, overclockers, and record setters. Since maximum performance is their goal, they invariably choose SLI as part of their setup. For these enthusiasts, Intel's new flagship platform is very exciting.

SLI has been very well served by Intel's existing high-end CPUs. A Nehalem based Core i7 is more than powerful enough for high-end setups such as two GeForce GTX 580s in SLI. But when three GeForce GTX 580s are put to work, the sheer graphical throughput of the GPUs begin to tax even the fastest CPU. In these cases, for the GPU to truly fly, a faster CPU is needed. Intel's new Sandy Bridge E processors do just that.

Intel's new flagship CPU is the Core i7 3960X. With six cores running at 3.3 GHz and 15MB of L3 cache, it handsomely beats its predecessor, especially in heavily threaded applications.


Compared to the Core i7 965 on X58, we found 3-way SLI performance improves almost by 30% in Mafia II, over 20% in Bulletstorm, and over 10% in Metro 2033.


In 3D Mark Vantage using the Performance Preset, 3-way GeForce GTX 580 SLI on the X79 platform scored 42,304 3DMarks, 30% higher than the fastest X58 platform.


X79 also brings full support for 4-way SLI. This allows you to connect four GeForce GTX 580s together for stupendous performance.


Articles: The New Flagship Platform for SLI: Intel's Sandy Bridge E and X79 - GeForce
 
Freddie1980 said:
Exactly, the benefits of replacing your CPU have diminished greatly over the years and for your average PC enthusiast come PC gamer is there any need to replace a 5 year Q6600/Q6700 that's been overclocked to over 3Ghz or even an AMD Phenom II X4?
Click to expand...

Your average gamer buys an Xbox 360/ps3 and a laptop for office/the web.

An average pc gamer is a bit harder to define as everyone does something different. Myself, I enjoy gaming on a 27" display at max settings. There is no way a q6600 would be able to keep up. I saw impressive gains with a 4870x2 when I originally moved from an overclocked q6600 to an i7.

This platform caters for the absolute high end. 2, 3 and 4 gpu setups will behave better on this platform than on sb, if you've got a multi screen setup on a multi gpu array then again, the two go and in hand.

Sure, there is diminishing returns as there always has been with high end - ultra high end gear but if you don't like that then get the mainstream option.

I don't see this being too hot however, there is little gain when coming from a well clocked nehalem or sb setup as there are no pci-e 3 gpu's yet and there are only a few games that use more than 2-4 threads, even then the impact can be small. Ivy will get the mainstream pci-e 3 train rolling, native USB 3, far lower power consumption and potentially better overclocking while having an integrated gpu that the 2011 socket excludes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom