As a gamer, the first question on my mind about these processors would be: are they any better than the old stuff when it comes to gaming?

Personally I am still rocking a Core i7 920 which was released way back in 2008, mainly due to the fact that I don’t believe that anything has been released since then that is economically worth upgrading to, for gaming purposes at least.

With this in mind, we at GP managed to get hold of two new Sandy Bridge processors from Intel to test, the Core i5 2500K and the Core i7 2600K, and we’re going to whack them through a gauntlet of game tests to see if they really are any better than my trusty old 2008 technology.

Note: A chip on the first range of motherboards for the Sandy Bridge platform had an issue where SATA performance would degrade over time, and eventually fail completely. There was a huge recall program that was initiated, so if you happened to buy one of them, take it back to the shop you bought it from and get them to replace it.

If you are buying a new board now, make sure it is a “B3 revision” board – these are defect-free. There is not, and has never been, an issue with the processors themselves.

Specifications

Here are the vital statistics for the chips:

From the graph above you would forgiven for thinking that in Turbo Mode the new chips operate at about 1.0GHz faster than the older Core i7 920 and i5 750 – not quite true. That figure is the maximum level, and can only be reached by a single core if it is within low enough thermal and power envelopes.

During testing, the 2500K and 2600K actually usually operated at 3.4GHz and 3.5Ghz respectively. To compensate for this, I will test the Core i7 920 both at stock speed and overclocked to 3.5GHz, to give a more apples-to-apples view. I will also throw a Core i5 750 in there for testing as well, as it is closer in spec to the 2500K, given that it lacks HyperThreading.

I wanted to overclock the Sandy Bridge processors as well because I had seen many reports online about them reaching 4.5GHz and beyond just on air cooling, but sadly the Intel motherboard supplied for testing had a beta-version BIOS loaded which didn't support changing the multiplier on these unlocked chips. All Sandy Bridge processor models which end in 'K' are multiplier unlocked - you can't easily overclock them any other way so make sure you get one of these if you want to tinker with the speed.

The other thing worth mentioning which isn’t shown in the graph is the fact that the two Sandy Bridge processors also contain built-in GPUs. I haven’t tested the performance of these video processors but I know from past experience that modern games aren’t playable at high resolution using them (much like any other onboard graphics solution).

Head over to the next page for the test results.