Intel Core i7-3820 Review: Sandy Bridge-E for the masses

[Guest]

I'm really concidering the 3820 for my build. My parts list for an i5 3570 is $1350-ish and $1550-ish for the 3820 list. In the later build there would be two available PCIe ports at 16x- the support for quad channel ram-usb3...etc. Not to mention, I'll be on a MB with the newer socket and chipset for later CPUs.

I'd like to hear anything anyone has to say about running Planetside 2 well. As far as I can tell anything you can do CPU wise is what gains frames per second. Love to see these chips benchmarked with it somehow.

 

[captaincranky]

Is it just me or does the tick (or tock, not sure which one this is) of Intel's tick/tock release schedule seem to be becoming less and less of an actual advancement?

Microcenter is using the i3-3225 as a promotional football, selling it for $119.95, ($144.95 @ Newegg), if you but if with a given selection of boards.

This chip is a dual core 4 thread offering, but it has the better HD-4000 graphics onboard. I bought it with a Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H (ATX) board, $149.95 (?) @ Newegg)), for just a shade over $200.00.

Haven't put this together yet, but with a 22nm CPU drawing only 55 watts TDP, graphics included all, it should be an outstanding and thrifty mainstream dynamo.

Point being, Ivy Bridge, without the 22nm process doesn't seem to offer too much over Sandy. Or at the very least you have to go to great lengths to obviate it.

OTOH, Ivy Bridge seems to offer an honest improvement, with respect to a general purpose mid-price machine.

As far as the memory latency issues uncovered in the review go, buying the exact same brand memory modules, (GSkill DDR3-1600), in 4GB capacity will net you 9-9-9-24, but 8GB modules come in at 10-10-10-30. I'm guessing that disparity could only become worse, when spread across 4 8GB modules in 4 channels.

So, where should we be laying the blame for the memory bandwidth issues in the review, on the CPU, the boards, the DIMMs themselves, or any combination of the foregoing factors?