Random X79 and Ivy Bridge sightings at IDF2011

[dividebyzero]

For your perusal...
A showcase of X79 boards from Gigabyte and MSI

Intel's more staid offering (Legit Reviews)

Intel's Ivy Bridge slide deck (Anandtech)

...and a preliminary look at some performance numbers for Sandy Bridge-E from Tom's Hardware

 

[SKYSTAR]

according to the review in tom's hardware the i7 2600k still the fastest cpu for gaming

 

[dividebyzero]

And likely to remain so for a while at least. Sandy Bridge-E is still basically Sandy Bridge (P67/Z68) so 1-4 active CPU threads (which covers most games) at 3.4GHz on a 2600K is likely to beat 1-4 active threads at 3.3GHz on a 3960X.

Sandy Bridge-E is more about productivity and content creation (and probably meaningless synthetic benchmarks) where the extra cores/threads can be utilised effectively by multi-threaded programs (i.e. where Gulftown presently beats Sandy Bridge)...think of it as a jack-of-all-trades platform - competant gamer and budget workstation (compared with Xeon).

From a purely gaming perspective, the X79 platform offers little until games are coded to take advantage of 6-12 threads. Ivy Bridge (Z77) will be the next gamer orientated platform from Intel with it's likely higher base frequency and higher OC headroom over Sandy Bridge.