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
Not yet, hasn't been long enough to see how it stacks up long term.

I'd give a few chips legendary nods:
Celeron 300A - masssive clock/performance bumps and dirt cheap.
Q6600, especially the G0's - Overclocked very well, aged extremely well, these things are still respectable for gaming 6 years after launch.
 
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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Actually I do I specifically wanted to cut down on heat - I even bought a True cooler but didn't feel like disassembling everything to install it. (It came two weeks after everything else) So the stock intel cooller is doing great.
 
JayteeBates said:
Actually I do I specifically wanted to cut down on heat - I even bought a True cooler but didn't feel like disassembling everything to install it. (It came two weeks after everything else) So the stock intel cooller is doing great.
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I have never used the stock cooler. Maybe one day I will try it, laugh, and then switch it. :)

Even on my backup comps, I use the CM 212+.
 
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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As a person who is running sandy bridge I would have to agree with this, and then even point to the q9550 that when paired with a decent video card is still a beast till this day.

Personally I think it was far more significant than the q6600.
 
The 2500k is legendary, and there just might be some merit to the arguement it may be the most legendary CPU every created. Now that intel is shifting over to efficiency over performance we may see the OC 2500K just feel like it does not run out of steam for a very long time. When I first saw the over clocks on it and price / value I knew it was going to be a long term winner just like the q6600 and i7 920 I had before, so I migrated 3 of my systems to sandy bridge, one 2600K was the result of a MC deal that made it almost as cheap as the 2500k. But the 2500K really stands out because you did not need a MC deal to have a great CPU at a great price, 920 could not say the same.

The irony of it all, try to find a 2500k in a system built by a big OEM, its pretty hard.

And others mentioned whats worse is that software is not going anywhere either, everyone is trying to shrink so they can be mobile.

I bet if we come back here in 10 years a ton of people will be saying the 2500K was the last desktop CPU I ever owned. Hopefully I will not be one of them though =[
 
rudy said:
The 2500k is legendary, and there just might be some merit to the arguement it may be the most legendary CPU every created. Now that intel is shifting over to efficiency over performance we may see the OC 2500K just feel like it does not run out of steam for a very long time. When I first saw the over clocks on it and price / value I knew it was going to be a long term winner just like the q6600 and i7 920 I had before, so I migrated 3 of my systems to sandy bridge, one 2600K was the result of a MC deal that made it almost as cheap as the 2500k. But the 2500K really stands out because you did not need a MC deal to have a great CPU at a great price, 920 could not say the same.

The irony of it all, try to find a 2500k in a system built by a big OEM, its pretty hard.

And others mentioned whats worse is that software is not going anywhere either, everyone is trying to shrink so they can be mobile.

I bet if we come back here in 10 years a ton of people will be saying the 2500K was the last desktop CPU I ever owned. Hopefully I will not be one of them though =[
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An OEM system usually does not allow for overclocking, so why would OEMs pay extra for an overclocking CPU when they're not going to allow it anyways?

That last statement is extremely doubtful. Growth goes in both directions. With a more efficient design and process, Intel and AMD will have products that scale up for max performance and scale down for low power consumption.

Mobile isn't the end all, there will always be newer programs designed for desktops that will take advantage of the additional power (i.e. Crisis 3). It's just at the moment mobile is the largest expanding market, but who knows when that bubble will burst.
 
Most of the OEMs I am talking about were offering the 2600k or 3770k, so i think that is not the issue. The issue is it was a silly upselling technique rather than trying to get a good balance for the customer.

Mobile should not be the end all, but I dont know it looks like it is for most people and once all the volume heads that way companies stop focusing on desktop performance. If volume is low enough they might try to force the desktop market to be something else. Like maybe they will try to force us to buy server chips, or multiple mobile chips. Or maybe we will just not see much of an advantage over taking the smaller form factor.
 
I would have to say, not yet.

The 2500K & 2600K are great,but the legendary status comes from how long it holds up and the fun/badassnes of the OC.
Unfortunately there is nothing fun or badass about OC on the 2500K and 2600K.

I would have to say very few processors qualify as legendary, which is the point of legendary.
I am probably missing one or two models in the list below, but going back through history to remember and find the legendary models is time consuming.

The Celeron 300A is obvious.
The Athlon 64 X2 3800+, it was expensive, but dual core was worth it for the enthusiast and you knew it was better than the dual core P4.
The Q6600 deserves a spot as well, it was the first quad core you could pick up as a regular user and it was worth using time to OC.
Phenom II X6 1090T, 6 cores and 4 GHz is achievable under a large air cooler. Exceptional OC fun with a myriad of settings for the OCD OC person.

As funny as it may seem, I have not owned any of the processors on this list.

Honerable mentions:
Duron 700, getting to 1 GHz on the cheap was an awesome feat.
Athlon 1700+/1800+ T-bred B, going past 2 GHz was an awesome feat.
C2D E8300, Getting a good OC on these is hard due to high FSB and low multi, but when OC'ed it's still a good performer in low threaded applications.
Celeron E3300, finally one i own/have owned, hitting 4 GHz with a $50 CPU and cheap air is awesome.

EDIT:
added KazeoHins suggestion.
 
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I personally think the AMD 1090t is worth mentioning as a legendary CPU. It was the first affordable 6-core, and gave the first-gen i7s a run for thier money in multithreaded tasks, AND cost less doing so. It was a shame that awesomeness was so short lived: after Sandybridge hit the market, the AMD CPUs were worthless.
 
I still think it's too early to really tell - right now the 2500K is pretty legendary but I think if it can prove itself through another generation or two it can be considered "legendary". But I'm sure we'll see people still pushing them for a long time to come. Just like the 920's people are still rockin' strong.
 
KazeoHin said:
I personally think the AMD 1090t is worth mentioning as a legendary CPU. It was the first affordable 6-core, and gave the first-gen i7s a run for thier money in multithreaded tasks, AND cost less doing so. It was a shame that awesomeness was so short lived: after Sandybridge hit the market, the AMD CPUs were worthless.
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not to be a dick but it in no way is deserving when it's getting compared to these other chips, when it wasn't even that great when released. However the first athlon 64's to come along absolutely are, as are the old blue core thunderbirds I haven't seen mentioned yet which were insane for the price at the time.
 
to me- no.
For example, the q6600 was an affordable versions of the fastest CPU available, having really only a lower multi, but otherwise being identical. In essence, it had the soul of a high end processor, but was priced at $200 at the height of it's popularity iirc.

The 2500k, although being really fast and very affordable, wasn't an upgrade over the previous gulftown chips, for one. I know the 980x was a very niche cpu, but it had 6 cores, hyperthreading, triple channel memory, and it overclocked great too. The 980x just didn't have pricing on its side, but it showed that intel was capable of a lot. I didn't get that same feeling at the launch of the 2500k and 2600k roughly a year later.

Second, I for one, didn't care for how intel handled product segmentation with these 1155 processors. You want full L3 cache? You have to pay more. You want hyperthreading? You have to pay more. You want an unlocked processor? You have to pay more. These should have been standard features for the whole lineup. In lou of all that, we get on die integrated graphic as a standard feature. Argh, a feature no enthusiast cares about. And this still holds true today with ivy bridge, and will probably continue with haswell. I would rather intel just price the x79 chipset and 2011 processors more aggressively so these could be more popular, so that these high end processors with on die graphics can be put out of their misery. But back to my point, I don't think the 2500k can be considered legendary when it was only better than the 2500 (locked multi) because intel wanted to nickel and dime overclockers. In the same sense, I feel the 2500k was also artificially hampered with no hyperthreading and lower L3 cache just to make the 2600k look better. The q6600, on the other hand, was clocked lower than the qx6800 due to yields and such; it was not worse because intel decided to randomly disable things in an effort to make people pay more.

All that being said, I'm currently eying a second hand 2500k pretty hard. Despite its flaws, speed is speed.
 
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My 2600k has run every day @ 4.8ghz with zero issues now for 2 years. The last time I felt this good about a processor was an E8400. I don't see any reason to upgrade for a long while.
 
KazeoHin said:
I personally think the AMD 1090t is worth mentioning as a legendary CPU. It was the first affordable 6-core, and gave the first-gen i7s a run for thier money in multithreaded tasks, AND cost less doing so. It was a shame that awesomeness was so short lived: after Sandybridge hit the market, the AMD CPUs were worthless.
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AMD could not even catch the I7 920 in performance at stock, or even overclocked.

It took the 8350 to finally match the I7 920 in performance.

This is why the I7 920 is very legendary!
 
I would also have to add the Athlon XP and Athlon 64 Dual Core series for price/performance comparison to Intel's offerings at the time.
 
i7 920 > sandybridge. The performance difference between the core and i7 series at that point is the real killer.

Top that off with the fact that anyone running a 6c/12t gulftown has _no_ reason to upgrade even on the release of haswell... Well, that just illustrates the fact that sandybridge isn't legendary, as it's being skipped over by people with equipment several generations old.

There's really been barely any improvement as far as cpu performance goes for the last several generations of intel CPU's. Which pretty much eliminates them from being considered legendary.
 
Zoson said:
i7 920 > sandybridge. The performance difference between the core and i7 series at that point is the real killer.

Top that off with the fact that anyone running a 6c/12t gulftown has _no_ reason to upgrade even on the release of haswell... Well, that just illustrates the fact that sandybridge isn't legendary, as it's being skipped over by people with equipment several generations old.

There's really been barely any improvement as far as cpu performance goes for the last several generations of intel CPU's. Which pretty much eliminates them from being considered legendary.
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This is where you are wrong. there are HUGE improvements in Heat and Power usage when you upgrade to SB or IB (and a some IPC improvements too).

You can't deny that fact.
 
DASHlT said:
This is where you are wrong. there are HUGE improvements in Heat and Power usage when you upgrade to SB or IB (and a some IPC improvements too).

You can't deny that fact.
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I didn't say anything about heat or power(because I don't care about them, and neither do 99.9% of the people on this forum, as we're overclocking enthusiasts).

I said performance.

Of which, there are barely any improvements. Almost all the development since bloomfield and gulftown has been on the igp. The proof is in the pudding. There's basically no real-world benefit from upgrading off a bloomfield/gulftown to one of the new cpu's. Why? Because we all are using GPU's that make the igp's useless anyway.

So the facts? Upgrading off gulftown to sandy would do nothing for me. It would, in fact, decrease the performance of my system for the heavily multithreaded tasks I run. That's the facts.
 
got my 2600K from Microcenter for $139 it runs at 4800MHZ 24/7 on stock voltage, I would think this chip is LEGENDARY!
 
Which CPU is the legendary one? That's everyone's preference. It's the one that made them proud of owning their systems. For me it was the Athlon XP 2500+ Barton 1.83GHz being easily overclockable to 2.5GHz.

And then the Q6600.

And then this 2600K.
 
Another vote for the i7 920 here. I've been doing this for a long time, and this is by the longest I have ever had a chip. In fact, I keep looking for excuses to upgrade since it has been so long, and I just can't find a compelling reason (other than I want to).
 
Still rocking my 920 D0 3.5 years after building my X58 system... got her at 4.13Ghz on air and, as I am primarily a gamer, I haven't felt any true need to upgrade. Contrast that with the fact I have gone through 3 generations of AMD GPU's on this mobo... and only now using dual 7970's do I believe I am slightly CPU bottlenecked in some games.

Probably will upgrade to Haswell but who knows?
 
NukeDukem said:
Still rocking my 920 D0 3.5 years after building my X58 system... got her at 4.13Ghz on air and, as I am primarily a gamer, I haven't felt any true need to upgrade. Contrast that with the fact I have gone through 3 generations of AMD GPU's on this mobo... and only now using dual 7970's do I believe I am slightly CPU bottlenecked in some games.

Probably will upgrade to Haswell but who knows?
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I'm in a similar boat as you - I have a Q9550 that is overclocked quite a bit. But when I built this system I started with dual 512 mb 4870s in crossfire, then upgraded to a single 2 gb 6950, and just upgraded to a 3 gb 7950.

I ran system monitoring while playing Far Cry 3 yesterday - I will still maxing out the GPU before the CPU. It is probbaly the most demanding game right now and it runs beautifully.
 
The 2500K had such rediculous price vs performance, combine that with the incredibly easy overclocking it is by far the best processor I have ever bought. Way too good to upgrade to Ivy for sure. Let's see what the next generation brings!
 
NukeDukem said:
Still rocking my 920 D0 3.5 years after building my X58 system... got her at 4.13Ghz on air and, as I am primarily a gamer, I haven't felt any true need to upgrade. Contrast that with the fact I have gone through 3 generations of AMD GPU's on this mobo... and only now using dual 7970's do I believe I am slightly CPU bottlenecked in some games.

Probably will upgrade to Haswell but who knows?
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I'm in the same boat as well. Love my i7 920, this is the longest that I have ever had a processor for, (except my 486 when I was a kid).

I'm probably not going to upgrade until the next process shrink, 14nm I think?
 
In many ways Sandy Bridge was the beginning of the end for the enthusiast overclocker. Bus speed OC'ing is now irrelevant and multipliers are locked except for special SKU's. Since Sandy Bridge we've seen incremental increases in IPC and architecture overclockabilty. Haswell's IPC increase doesn't seem to be a giant leap forward and overclocking remains to be seen. With Haswell's focus appearing to be power efficiency who knows what that means for the edge-of-stability power tweakers.
 
Pretty sure the problem here is software hasn't really caught up with the hardware which is why older CPUs are still getting the job done.
 
Skillz said:
Pretty sure the problem here is software hasn't really caught up with the hardware which is why older CPUs are still getting the job done.
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Agreed. There arn't any PC games on the Market that I like that can use more than 3 CPU cores. Sad really but at the same time I get great performance with what I have considering the limitations of my Monitor.
 
The 2500k was my first Intel processor in a system I built myself and it was/is amazing.

AMD will have to do something dramatic to make me consider coming back for a main system processor.
 
I think my P4 Northwood 1.8 overclocked to 2.4 was pretty darn good. Not legendary.

300a to 464 was legendary. 550 to 825 was awesome, but not legendary.

Sandy Bridge is an excellent overclocker, but 5 years from now, we won't be talking about "The good ol' days with the SB 2600K". A very great CPU, great overclocking potential, great performance, but it's not legendary. Close, though. It might earn the legendary status, but not right now. It took a while after the 300a to gain legendary status. Once people figured out that the 300a really that amazing and was nearly one of a kind (there were others, but this was a biggie).
 
Ur_Mom said:
I think my P4 Northwood 1.8 overclocked to 2.4 was pretty darn good. Not legendary.

300a to 464 was legendary. 550 to 825 was awesome, but not legendary.

Sandy Bridge is an excellent overclocker, but 5 years from now, we won't be talking about "The good ol' days with the SB 2600K". A very great CPU, great overclocking potential, great performance, but it's not legendary. Close, though. It might earn the legendary status, but not right now. It took a while after the 300a to gain legendary status. Once people figured out that the 300a really that amazing and was nearly one of a kind (there were others, but this was a biggie).
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2.4C was pretty legendary.
 
The 300a (@ 450, 464, and up) started the mendocino craze, but people forget about the 366 +slotket converter (sL36c malaysian) which commonly ran at 550, 567, 616, and higher with sub-ambient cooling. Back then, TEC-cooling/chilling was highly successful due to the low power density - so I ended up with something like 744mhz.

Yep, the mendocino was legendary. I didn't feel any need to upgrade until well after the 1Ghz mark was hit in the athlon/P3 war... skipped Katmai.

SB is good though... no de-lidding necessary to achieve monstrous clocks... for ease-of-use, acceptable heat/power, it can't be beat.
 
NukeDukem said:
Still rocking my 920 D0 3.5 years after building my X58 system... got her at 4.13Ghz on air and, as I am primarily a gamer, I haven't felt any true need to upgrade. Contrast that with the fact I have gone through 3 generations of AMD GPU's on this mobo... and only now using dual 7970's do I believe I am slightly CPU bottlenecked in some games.

Probably will upgrade to Haswell but who knows?
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Yep the 920 D0 is easily the true legend amongst all I7's, around 4Ghz still monsters pretty much everything you can throw at it. SB is a little faster but its also much newer so really can't compete for legendary status :p


I doubt you are CPU limited in anything except low resolutions which I doubt you do. Its pretty easy to see just use Task Manager or performance monitor in the background, see if any cores have been maxed once you alt/tab out. Most people make the mistake of looking at overall CPU utilisation which is not accurate due to the threads.
 
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/intel_core_i7_920_and_965_review,1.html

OP didn't give us much choices but I think the i7-920 is a more influential processor. Integrating the NB into the processor, adding triple-channel RAM, creating a real quad-core, bringing back HT, the i7-920 did all of that. Hell, the damn thing came out in 2008, it's over 4 years old now and the people who bought it for $300 back then are still rocking one of the fastest processors for gaming.
 
Mr. Stryker said:
Which CPU is the legendary one? That's everyone's preference. It's the one that made them proud of owning their systems. For me it was the Athlon XP 2500+ Barton 1.83GHz being easily overclockable to 2.5GHz.

And then the Q6600.

And then this 2600K.
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That's hilarious, you took the same path as I did. Oh accept you forgot about the legendary e5200 that hit the FSB wall at 3.6 Ghz, and it would have done more if that wall would just move!!!
 
My vote would be for the i7-920. it was also more reasonably priced then previous processors and 4 years after launch is still very powerful.
 
I'd say the i7 920 is more Legendary. 2500K is a close second. I went from a 130w Nehalem to a 45w Ivy and the biggest difference to me was that my room ambient is now cooler by a million degrees.
 
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