Sandy Bridge = Legendary?

Is SB legendary?

  • Yes

    Votes: 173 55.6%

  • No

    Votes: 74 23.8%

  • Not yet

    Votes: 64 20.6%
  • Total voters
    311
B

blade52x

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 9, 2006
Messages
3,191
Sandy Bridge has been out for two years now, and is still among the top for performance. The IPC increase versus the first geneation i7 was not anything spectacular, but their overclocking (and their ezmode overclocking) made them clear winners. The Q6600 is legendary, but 2 years after its release the 45nm quads left it behind with their 4ghz overclocks, and the soon to be i7s would make it obsolete for us enthusiasts. If Haswell is only a 10% increase in IPC, unless it is clocking to 5ghz and beyond easily, outside of a few new instruction sets it will not have a major performance advantage over the SB architecture. An overclocked SB would then end up being very relevant for another year or even two. Haswell will obviously bring us power improvements, but SB honestly is not bad with power draw even highly overclocked. (unlike the Q6600 which sucked a good bit of power at 3.6ghz)

I am not making this thread to try to convince others to buy an Intel chip. I started with a 2500K in March 2011 before I ended up with a 2700K and I feel that the LGA1155 platform has really been something special. Unfortunately it may have also may have began an era of minimal CPU gains (downfall of AMD, Ivy Bridge, possibly Haswell next).

I am curious what others think. My brother is still rocking a release Q6600 G0, and at the rate things are going, I could see my 2700K going the length as well.
 
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Mr. Stryker said:
This thread makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
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LOL.

1155 is what the standard it is thanks to the crazy performance, the lack of competition from AMD, and the pricing of LGA2011. I think it has the makings of legend. Far easier to OC higher than anything before, can be OC'd even with the stock cooler....and both boards and CPUs aren't that pricey for what ya get. We'll have to see what Haswell brings.
 
Not yet. It's going to take a long time to see how SB/IB fares with future programs and games. If they can still hang by the time Skylake emerges to market, then yes, tag it as legendary. IMO. :)
 
Celeron 300A on a 440BX was pretty legendary for price v performance. If there was a Celeron SKU that could do the same, that'd be legendary IMO.
 
I have a feeling that the Intel® Core™ i5-2500K will go down as one of the best processor we have ever released. It opened the door for overclocking for a great deal more people than ever before and It had a price that was reasonable for the level of performance that it game.
 
WillC310 said:
Celeron 300A on a 440BX was pretty legendary for price v performance. If there was a Celeron SKU that could do the same, that'd be legendary IMO.
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^^^ That's going to be a hard one to beat for a long time to anyone who can remember playing with them. I'd add the classic Athlon to that list of "legends" as well. As for SB.. it's getting there. I got my 2500k and MSI P67 at release and have been quite happy to pass on upgrading. :D
 
I've yet to find anything that taxes my OC'd i7 920 that would make me want to get SB/IVB
 
Yes it's one of the best cpu's released by them bar none. A few others similiar I can say would be the Athlon 2400+, Opteron, Northwood for sure, Celeron 300A.
 
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blade52x said:
Sandy Bridge has been out for two years now, and is still among the top for performance. The IPC increase vs the first geneation i7 was not anything spectular, but their overclocking (and their ezmode overclocking) made them clear winners. The Q6600 is legendary, but 2 years after release the 45nm quads left it behind with their 4ghz overclocks, and the soon to be i7s would make it obsolete for us enthusiasts. If Haswell is only a 10% increase in IPC, unless it is clocking to 5ghz and beyond easily, outside of a few new instruction sets, it will not have a major performance advantage SB. And overclocked SB would then end up still being very relevant for another year or even two. Haswell will obviously bring us power savings, but SB honestly is not bad with power draw even highly overclocked.

I am not making this thread to try to convince others to buy an Intel chip. I started with a 2500K in March 2011 before I ended up with a 2700K and I feel that the LGA1155 platform has really been something special. Unfortunately it may have also may have began an era of minimal CPU gains (downfall of AMD, Ivy Bridge, possibly Haswell next).

I am curious what others think. My brother is still rocking a release Q6600 G0, and at the rate things are going, I could see my 2700K going the length as well.
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I agree on the minimal cpu gain part. The newer chips will be a little more efficient and a bit more faster clock for clock, but not by much.(comparing a 2500K to a 3570K, not much difference really)
When you can OC 4.5 and higher, there is not much that can compare unless you do the same to a 6 core. :)
 
I think the 2500K is pretty much legendary.

I have an i7 860 that OCs decently to about 3.7, but I have had the itch to upgrade to an 2500K at 4.5.

I hope Haswell will have been worth the wait (currently not convinced).
 
lordsegan said:
I think the 2500K is pretty much legendary.

I have an i7 860 that OCs decently to about 3.7, but I have had the itch to upgrade to an 2500K at 4.5.

I hope Haswell will have been worth the wait (currently not convinced).
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Clock for clock the Ib is 200-300 mhz faster then SB. If haswell is the same, then not much of a gain.
But if I had to buy new and the price was close, I would get the newest. The $99 special that microcenter had on the 2500K was making me wish even more I had one close.. :)
 
i think the i7 920 is slightly on top of SB. but thats just me... :p
 
Dark Shade said:
I've yet to find anything that taxes my OC'd i7 920 that would make me want to get SB/IVB
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I definitely agree. I've had my 920 D0 since release and never never never have I honestly maxed it out (other than in Prime95 :D )
I would call nehalem legendary myself, or at least bloomfield.
 
DejaWiz said:
How so? IB runs cooler and draws less power than SB...until the "thermal wall" is passed when OC'ing.
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Yep! But that rule only apply to stock setting.

Who keep their CPU running on stock in here anyway !? :D
 
shansoft said:
Yep! But that rule only apply to stock setting.

Who keep their CPU running on stock in here anyway !? :D
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You mean stock voltage settings. As long as the voltages are at stock, you can overclock IB and still net lower temps than SB. It's when you increase voltages to get even higher overclocks that it runs hotter.
 
86 5.0L said:
i think the i7 920 is slightly on top of SB. but thats just me... :p
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Tsumi said:
I think the 920 would be more legendary than SB.
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AthlonXP said:
I agree you have to look at when it came out (Fall 2008) and how over 4 years later its still going strong.
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Meh, I'd still give it to the 1155 parts. Mainstream 1155 socket parts outdoing the enthusiast line parts of the old 1366 generation in OCing and ease OCing as well as performance all while outdoing the old enthusiast part thermally...and simultaneously being a far better $/performance part than the new enthusiast socket parts, and not giving up that much real world performance either.
 
Skripka said:
Meh, I'd still give it to the 1155 parts. Mainstream 1155 socket parts outdoing the enthusiast line parts of the old 1366 generation in OCing and ease OCing as well as performance all while outdoing the old enthusiast part thermally...and simultaneously being a far better $/performance part than the new enthusiast socket parts, and not giving up that much real world performance either.
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That's not exactly a fair comparison. Of course mainstream parts are supposed to be cheaper than enthusiast parts, and of course the new generation is supposed to be better than the previous generation, especially when it's just overhauls of the same base architecture.

For the 920s, they were well worth the cost over a P55 system. And ate AMD Phenom IIs for breakfast. And were fun as hell to overclock. Z68 and Z77 platforms are now "Increase multi. Derp BSOD, increase vcore offset."
 
Tsumi said:
That's not exactly a fair comparison. Of course mainstream parts are supposed to be cheaper than enthusiast parts, and of course the new generation is supposed to be better than the previous generation, especially when it's just overhauls of the same base architecture.

For the 920s, they were well worth the cost over a P55 system. And ate AMD Phenom IIs for breakfast. And were fun as hell to overclock. Z68 and Z77 platforms are now "Increase multi. Derp BSOD, increase vcore offset."
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Ya want something that is "fun" to OC a.k.a. constantly BSODs and needs tweaked til "just right" and runs hot as hell; and then needs retweaked once the CPU starts degrading with an annoying IMC that has problems handling large pools of DDR3 at stock clocks over 1600mHz...or ya want something that you dial up and just use, and doesn't give a shit about how much memory you have or what speed it is. :)

And the first sentence of your second paragraph is my point. With 2011 and 1155, there is no point in 2011 performance wise unless you need 8Dimms of memory or will actually leverage a hexen CPU. While X58 legitimately had a leg up on P55, X79 doesn't really have a leg up on Z68/77 for most enthusiast users.
 
Skripka said:
X79 doesn't really have a leg up on Z68/77 for most enthusiast users.
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And in most comparison reviews I've read, the Z68/Z77 easily matches or can even outpace the X79 in certain games. Granted, I haven't read any reviews of X79 since it's release...
 
i7 920... it was a big jump and affordable enough to end up in a huge percentage of systems here.

In fact, I'd say even the early adopters got a considerable bang for the buck even if it were premium. I got it maybe a year to a year and a half after the fact, only thing that had come down was DDR3 and the mobos a little (and the D0 perk/reward). For not too much more I could have been rocking it from earlier on. That it can still be considered a very capable chip speaks volumes. People who stuck with AMD and bemoaned how Intel changes their socket all the time, well swapping out chips and stuff over the years of the 920 reign (to chips that could only sniff it's moxi) were wasting time and really tossing some of that "bang for the buck" down the drain. A platform you just didn't feel the need to upgrade for a long time. Even now, many are doing it because they just haven't done it in forever! Swapped out GPUs, bought better SSDs etc, long before feeling a need for a faster cpu.
 
IMO no, it's an incremental upgrade over the LGA1366 processors. The jump from P4 -> Core2 and Core2 -> first generation i7 was more substantial. Not to knock SB, it's a great processor, but it's a logical evolution of the first generation i7, not a revolutionary CPU.
 
I Would have to say the I7 920 was legendary. I mean finally this year. AMD was able to catch the I7 920 (stock I might add) in performance.

But the 2500k is also a legendary proc as well. At the time for $200, no other proc could touch its price/performance.
 
overclock % wise I disagree

the i7-920 was better in that sense, a fair bit of D0s hit 4.0ghz , that's close to a 50% overclock, similar to the 300A(300mhz @ 450mhz oc'd), and Q6600 (2.4stock 3.6 oc'd is 50% again)

SB is good, just not as big of a jump from oc'ing :) 3.3/3.4 -> 4.8~
 
Dark Shade said:
I've yet to find anything that taxes my OC'd i7 920 that would make me want to get SB/IVB
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Pretty much this, I've had my 920 since about when it came out, never in my life had I had the same CPU for so long.
After a memory upgrade and SSD installation, I've yet to find anything I need more performance for.

The only reason I get the itch to replace it every now and then is simply because i feel like I've had it for so long, lol
 
Not yet.

If in two more years I'm still comfortably using my 2500K then I'll upgrade it to legendary.
 
DejaWiz said:
i7-3770K realizes about a 15+% lower power consumption at load than an i7-2600K. I'd say that's pretty damn significant.
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Like I said, not much. Is it really going to save you big $$? No. its worth it if the cpu is comparable and the same price or a few $$ more, but anything over that, no.
 
based on my experience with my i5-2500K it's absolutely legendary.

- affordable processor and mobo
- big overclocking potential
- simple and easy overclocking
- relatively easy to keep cool

all that combined makes for a huge bang for your buck setup. i upgraded from a Q6600 which i ran for 4 years. i've been spoiled by long-lasting, affordable CPU's.
 
Hagrid said:
Like I said, not much. Is it really going to save you big $$? No.

Its worth it if the cpu is comparable and the same price or a few $$ more, but anything over that, no.
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I suppose the power savings quotient is subjective...

But IB is certainly comparable to SB (better, with a 6% increase in IPC plus slightly higher stock clocks), and about the same price or a few $$ more at current street/market prices than SB was.

For those that bought a SB at anytime in the past, IB doesn't make much sense as an upgrade or even a transition, but I'd argue that for most running older CPU's and looking to upgrade to the LGA1155 platform, I'd argue that IB is clearly a better choice over SB in every sliced and diced piece of criteria.
 
I think both the Nehalem and Sandy Bridge chips have been amazing.

Ivy was a bit of a let down. The low end parts are the biggest problem at this point. Intel's so worried about cannibalizing other skus that now the lower end parts are so feature gimped that they're not getting much better where they should from generation to generation. The lack of hardware AES on mainstream CPUs is pretty stupid. The cost combined with the weak instruction sets kind of makes me lean towards AMD when I'm buying low cost stuff unless I'm super concerned about power use. Ivy has just pushed me even more in that direction.
 
DejaWiz said:
I suppose the power savings quotient is subjective...

But IB is certainly comparable to SB (better, with a 6% increase in IPC plus slightly higher stock clocks), and about the same price or a few $$ more at current street/market prices than SB was.

For those that bought a SB at anytime in the past, IB doesn't make much sense as an upgrade or even a transition, but I'd argue that for most running older CPU's and looking to upgrade to the LGA1155 platform, I'd argue that IB is clearly a better choice over SB in every sliced and diced piece of criteria.
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Heck yeah. I came from an 1045T OC to 3.2 and didnt see much in games, but video encoding and such it really helped.
If I were to buy new it would be an IB, unless I was near a MC and they had that $99 2500K offer!

The problem which has been stated is that the software isnt keeping up. I would love to see them make games that would bring a dual/tri video setup and OC 2500K/3570K to its knees.(with options to lower them of course)
 
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