Friggin’ Sandy Bridge, the golden child. My Westmere brothers and I are the biggest, baddest PC processors on the planet, and somehow, she still gets all the glory. Everybody is all, “Sandy this, Sandy that,” even though she’s slower than us. I say: if being second-rate and cheap were the keys to success in the world, everybody would be driving a Kia.

Well, look at the golden child now, hiding in inventory while her motherboards get replaced. Such a sad sight. People forget that “proven technology” isn’t just a euphemism for old, unwanted junk. My ICH10R south bridge may be a little seasoned, but at least it didn’t come out of the chute with a congenital defect. Plus, any little problems were ironed out several steppings ago.

They were originally going to introduce me last year, you know. I was ready long before the great Miss Bridge, but nooo, they didn’t want me getting in the way. I’ll tell you what, you can bet your fancy stock options they’re happy to have me to fill the gap now. Sure, it’s been a year since they rolled out my brother the 980X Extreme to great fanfare, and I’m only a 133MHz upgrade on his base and Turbo peak clock speeds, but that still makes me the fastest thing this side of the Larrabee cancellation.

I hate to brag, but with six cores at 3.46GHz, a Turbo peak of 3.73GHz, 12MB of L3 cache, and three channels of DDR3 memory, I’m kind of a big deal. Add in the fact that my upper multipliers are unlocked so that I can be overclocked, and you can see why my asking price is one dollar short of a grand. If you still don’t get it, just know that the valedictorian at your high school would probably have a nerdgasm over me. That’s the sort of response I tend to provoke among dudes who know what I am. And ladies, of course. Both of them are pretty excited, too.

Check out my “990X” tat in that picture up there. Just got that last week before going out for review. Pretty sweet, eh? I had ’em make the “X” extra large to remind people how extreme I am. I think it works pretty well. I might get a sleeve around the edges of my cap next, if I can find the right design. That’s a big commitment, though, and I want it to be right, so I’m taking my time.

My new digs

One of the benefits of being the sweetest piece of silicon known to man is that you get to hang pretty exclusively with with your peers in other fields. I’m in no danger of getting stuffed into a crappy HP enclosure with integrated graphics and half as much RAM as you’re gonna need to keep Windows from paging constantly. Instead, I drop into slick setups like the one above, with that near-silent Thermaltake Jing cooler and a motherboard with more ports than Oakland.

That board is brand-new, too, by the way. Intel is officially calling it the DX58SO2, but its real name is “Smackover 2″—that’s, heh, a back-handed reference to my utter domination of the competition. Nobody tell the FTC; those blowhards have zero sense of humor.

My X58 chipset already has way more PCIe lanes than Sandy Bridge, but if you must have the very latest in I/O standards, this board has two SATA 6Gbps ports and a pair of USB 3.0 ports. That’s probably enough for you geeks. Between you and me, I told them they should give it more ports of both types, but they didn’t want me showing up Miss Golden Child. Sheesh. As if Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte won’t hang three controller chips and 14 ports off of each of us. At least I have the PCIe lanes to handle it.

Here’s a shot of the PCIe ports, just to remind you that, although I’m a top-of-the-line model, I’m not too classy to engage in a three-way—SLI or CrossFire setup, that is, you perv.

That’s all good, but I do have a beef with something. Check out those plus and minus buttons right there on the motherboard. Get this: those are for raising and lowering my base clock in 1MHz increments. I said before I have an unlocked multiplier, but apparently that’s not good enough. We have to put buttons right on the board where any idiot can press them, and let me tell you: I am happy to overclock via the multiplier. I was made to do so. But raising my dang base clock hurts. Makes my PCIe lanes go all tingly and numb, and my memory controller gets a throbbing headache. Besides, who sticks his finger into a running PC, except for one of those sadistic freaks with the liquid nitrogen? Don’t get me started on them.

My understanding of what comes next is that I’m supposed to give you a little tour of my performance and such. I’ve had this jackwagon running all kinds of silly tests on me for the past couple of days, and now we’re going to look at the results. I’m not sure what good it will do to show you page after page of me kicking the tail of every other PC processor on the market, but I guess there might be a few folks out there who don’t know the score yet. I’m not one to deny them the chance to soak in my glory, so let’s get on with it.

Our testing methods

The jackwagon ran every test at least three times, and then he reported the median of the scores produced.

The test systems were configured like so:

Processor

Athlon II X3 455 3.3GHz Phenom II X2 565 3.4GHz Phenom II X4 840 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 975 3.6GHz Phenom II X4 1075T 3.0GHz Phenom II X4 1100T 3.3GHz Pentium

Extreme Edition 840 3.2GHz Pentium

G6950 2.8GHz Core

i7-990X 3.46 GHz Core

2 Duo E6400 2.13GHz Core

i3-560 3.33 GHz Core i5-655K 3.2GHz Core i5-760 2.8GHz Core i7-875K 2.93GHz Core

2 Quad Q9400 2.67GHz Motherboard Gigabyte

890GPA-UD3H Asus

P5E3 Premium Asus

P7P55D-E Pro Intel

DX58SO2 North bridge 890GX X48 P55 X58 South bridge SB850 ICH9R ICH10R Memory size 8GB

(4 DIMMs) 8GB

(4 DIMMs) 8GB

(4 DIMMs) 12GB

(6 DIMMs) Memory type Corsair CMD8GX3M4A1333C7 DDR3 SDRAM Corsair CMD8GX3M4A1600C8 DDR3 SDRAM Corsair CMD8GX3M4A1600C8 DDR3 SDRAM Corsair CMP12GX3M6A1600C8 DDR3 SDRAM Memory speed 1333 MHz 800

MHz 1066 MHz 1333 MHz 1066 MHz 1333 MHz 1333 MHz Memory timings 8-8-8-20 2T 7-7-7-20 2T 7-7-7-20 2T 8-8-8-20 2T 7-7-7-20 2T 8-8-8-20 2T 8-8-8-20 2T Chipset drivers AMD

AHCI 1.2.1.263 INF

update 9.1.1.1025 Rapid Storage Technology 9.6.0.1014 INF

update 9.1.1.1025 Rapid Storage Technology 9.6.0.1014 INF update 9.1.1.1020 Rapid Storage Technology 9.5.0.1037 Audio Integrated SB850/ALC892 with Realtek 6.0.1.6235 drivers Integrated ICH9R/AD1988B with Microsoft drivers Integrated P55/RTL8111B with Realtek 6.0.1.6235 drivers Integrated ICH10R/ALC892 with Realtek 6.0.1.6235 drivers

Processor Core

i7-950 3.06 GHz Core i7-970 3.2 GHz Core i7-980X Extreme 3.3 GHz Core

i3-2100 2.93 GHz Core i5-2400 3.1 GHz Core i5-2500K 3.3 GHz Core i7-2600K 3.4 GHz Atom

D525 1.8 GHz AMD

E-350 1.6GHz Motherboard Gigabyte

X58A-UD5 Asus

P8P67 Deluxe Jetway

NC94FL-525-LF MSI

E350IA-E45 North bridge X58 P67 NM10 Hudson

M1 South bridge ICH10R Memory size 12GB

(6 DIMMs) 8GB

(4 DIMMs) 4GB (2 DIMMs) 4GB (2 DIMMs) Memory type Corsair CMP12GX3M6A1600C8 DDR3 SDRAM Corsair CMD8GX3M4A1600C8 DDR3 SDRAM Corsair CM2X2048-8500C5D DDR2 SDRAM Corsair CMD8GX3M4A1333C7 DDR3 SDRAM Memory speed 1333 MHz 1333 MHz 800

MHz 1066 MHz Memory timings 8-8-8-20 2T 8-8-8-20 2T 5-5-5-18

2T 7-7-7-20 2T Chipset drivers INF update 9.1.1.1020 Rapid Storage Technology 9.5.0.1037 INF update

9.2.0.1016 Rapid Storage Technology 10.0.0.1046 INF update 9.1.1.1020 Rapid Storage Technology 9.5.0.1037 AMD

AHCI 1.2.1.275 Audio Integrated ICH10R/ALC889 with Realtek 6.0.1.6235 drivers Integrated P67/ALC889 with Microsoft drivers Integrated NM10/ALC662 with Realtek 6.0.1.6235 drivers Integrated Hudson M1/ALC887 with Realtek 6.0.1.6235 drivers

They all shared the following common elements:

Hard drive Corsair

Nova V128 SATA SSD Discrete graphics Asus

ENGTX460 TOP 1GB (GeForce GTX 460) with ForceWare 260.99 drivers OS Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition Power supply PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610 Watt

Thanks to Asus, Corsair, Gigabyte, and OCZ for helping to outfit our test rigs with some of the finest hardware available. Thanks to Intel and AMD for providing the processors, as well, of course.

The test systems’ Windows desktops were set at 1900×1200 in 32-bit color. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled in the graphics driver control panel.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

Some further notes on our testing methods:

Many of our performance tests are scripted and repeatable, but for some of the games, including Battlefield: Bad Company 2, we used the Fraps utility to record frame rates while playing a 60-second sequence from the game. Although capturing frame rates while playing isn’t precisely repeatable, we tried to make each run as similar as possible to all of the others. We raised our sample size, testing each Fraps sequence five times per video card, in order to counteract any variability. We’ve included second-by-second frame rate results from Fraps for those games, and in that case, you’re seeing the results from a single, representative pass through the test sequence.

We used a Yokogawa WT210 digital power meter to capture power use over a span of time. The meter reads power use at the wall socket, so it incorporates power use from the entire system—the CPU, motherboard, memory, graphics solution, hard drives, and anything else plugged into the power supply unit. (The monitor was plugged into a separate outlet.) We measured how each of our test systems used power across a set time period, during which time we ran Cinebench’s multithreaded rendering test.

The tests and methods we employ are usually publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

Memory subsystem performance

My six cores each have very fast L1 and L2 caches attached, so my cache bandwidth at the smaller block sizes is, uh, prodigious. Yeah, yeah, Sandy B’s fancy internal ring bus gives her an edge at the 4MB size. But look, I’m back in the saddle again at 16MB thanks to my massive 12MB L3 cache. There’s really no comparison.

My memory bandwidth and latency are among the best for PC processors, too, just as expected. Sure, the Core i7-950 scores a little higher in Stream, and the Core i7-875K has the lowest latency measured, but those are fluke performances from aging 45-nm chips with no real future. I’m your best bet all around.

StarCraft II

The jackwagon tested StarCraft II by playing back a recording of an epic 30-minute, eight-player match that he found online and capturing frame rates with Fraps. He decided not to repeat this test multiple times. He says it’s due to the long time window, but I think it’s sheer laziness. Jeez.

Yeah, yeah, so a couple of those “Special K” chips, as I like to call them, managed to eke out a few more frames per second than me in this test. Look, I also wasn’t any faster than the i7-980X, who came before me. I’m obviously being limited by external factors, like the higher latency on my PCIe connection or something—not that you’re gonna notice the difference between 96 and 98 FPS, anyway, Mr. Super Gamer.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Yep, that’s me sitting in my rightful spot at the top of the rankings. Get used to seeing that, folks. There’s gonna be lots of it.

Not that I couldn’t go faster, mind you. The video card and the game engine are surely holding me back. Maybe if the world’s game consoles were based on Intel processors like me instead of weakling PowerPC chips, running a game would be more of a challenge. As it is, I’m left with half my threads idle, running tight loops of incredibly dimwitted A.I. Yeah, cowboy, if you stick your head over the top of the fence again in that same place, he’s gonna shoot you. Duh.

Civilization V

Finally, here’s an example of what I’ve been talking about. Run this game normally with the graphics card doing its thing, and I’m tied for first with those two losers. Turn on the “no render” option, though, and I’m measurably faster—even than little miss Sandy B.

This units test is more of a challenge for a CPU. It involves more of my cores and threads, and so I’m even more of a winner in it.

F1 2010

Nice work, jackwagon. You’ve demonstrated that this test is GPU-limited at four different resolutions. Next up, why don’t you see how quickly I’ll read a 4,200-RPM hard disk? Or maybe test my web page rendering capabilities over a 300bps modem?

Metro 2033

I’m not participating in this sham. Look, I’m fast enough to run any game you could name perfectly well, but there’s some overhead associated with having a few threads ping-ponging around between my many cores on the whim of the Windows scheduler. Between that and the GPU limitations, I’m totally getting jobbed here. Either we can move on to some applications that make full use of my six cores and 12 threads, or I am finished.

Source engine particle simulation

There. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it? A properly threaded particle simulation ripped from a game engine lets me show what I can do.

Productivity

SunSpider JavaScript performance

Yawn.

7-Zip file compression and decompression

Check me out here putting Sandy in her place.

Sandy, that’s not a bad showing, just barely beating out the Phenom II X6 1100T and everything. Adds drama. I can’t help but think it would be stronger, though, if your architects hadn’t blown so much of your transistor budget on lousy integrated graphics. Haha!

TrueCrypt disk encryption

Yep, all six of my cores can accelerate AES encryption, and TrueCrypt takes advantage. That’s why I’m pushing through nearly 5GB/s in the AES tests, as are some of the other newer Intel CPUs. I’m the fastest overall, though—and best in every single sub-test. Total carnage.

Image processing

The Panorama Factory photo stitching

Right. Due to her fancy new “architecture,” Sandy B. manages to tie with me by executing more instructions per clock on her four cores. Nice. Friggin’ tocks get all the glory. I can stitch your panoramic image together in 11 seconds, just like her, and I’ll save the results to disk reliably, too. So there.

picCOLOR image processing and analysis

I have to say, I like this little image analysis benchmark. Runs on lots of threads and, well, the results speak for themselves, don’t they?

Video encoding

x264 HD benchmark

Windows Live Movie Maker 14 video encoding

Hey, I’m all for being thorough, stepping through the different dimensions of the desktop PC usage model, and all of that other junk. I’m down with showcasing my considerable talents, too. But isn’t this cornucopia of benchmarks losing a little steam by page 11? Good grief.

3D modeling and rendering

Cinebench rendering

POV-Ray rendering

Valve VRAD map compilation

I would like to thank the academy, my architects, designers, and all of the hard-working software developers who took the time to make their software multi-threaded. It was an honor and a pleasure to work with you all.

Scientific computing

MyriMatch proteomics

These two egghead benchmarks can be complicated to explain. If you want to learn more about them, go here.

STARS Euler3d computational fluid dynamics

Yeah, I can do the scientific computing stuff, too, better than Sandy or any of the rest of ’em. My three memory channels are a major advantage here, obviously.

Power consumption and efficiency

Time for a look at power efficiency. I dunno what they’re even doing here, really, but the jackwagon tells me the two sets of results for the ridiculously slow Atom D525 and AMD E-350 processors differ in a couple of ways. The primary set comes from a configuration just like my own, with a discrete GTX 460 graphics card and our 610W standard PSU connected. The second set, labeled “Brick PSU,” was captured with only integrated graphics in use and a laptop-style power brick.

So, yeah, totally unfair. Typical.

Take a look at those idle power draw readings for me. The nimrod doing the testing was initially confused when he got a look at those—actually thought something was wrong with my config. After way too many hertz passed, a little light bulb (seriously small, like a minor fraction of my TDP) finally went on over his head and he realized—the variability at idle where my power draw bounces up and down is a good thing. The drops represent power savings compared to the i7-980X, which he’d earlier tested on a Gigabyte X58 board that didn’t have the same power-saving mojo as my Intel DX58SO2. Yeah, the plot looks a little messy. Deal with it.

See? On this newer mobo, my idle power draw is way lower, on average, than the i7-980X’s. Heck, I’m right in line with that Phenom II X6 that has two fewer DIMMs onboard.

Yeah, I do draw more power under load than, well, anything, but so what? Don’t tell me you’re some kind of punk eco-weenie who wastes cycles worrying about such things. Please. If you start that, they’ll make me give my halogen-free spiel again, and I don’t think I could stand it. All I want is a couple hundred watts at peak times to make the magic happen. Surely you can understand that.

Since I finish rendering before anything else and have such nice, low power draw at idle, I end up near the middle of the pack here. Get in, get out, and get low is my motto.

Well, bless my six little hearts. Get a load of those numbers. I finish this job ahead of anyone, so my relatively high power draw at peak simply ends sooner. As a result, I’m one of the most power-efficient CPUs on the planet, by this measure. Where’s your beloved Atom now, Greenpeace freaks? Lingering at the bottom of the pack, that’s where. Betcha didn’t expect this result.

Yes, one model of Sandy B. is even more efficient by a little bit, but she’s also quite a bit slower than I am.

Overclocking

I could see the jackwagon doing the tests getting excited when it came time to overclock me. Your typical nerdgasm type response, like I mentioned. Get this. He boots me up into the BIOS, tries to raise my base multiplier, and the Intel board is all like, “Oh no you don’t. You’ve gotta raise the Turbo mults.” So he toggles down and selects a bunch of exotic multipliers in the thirties, raises my voltage past 1.4V, and reboots. Pretty soon, I’m up in Windows and guess what? No dice on the OC, big boy. I’m at stock clocks. The look on his face was frakking priceless.

He then proceeds to flail about, trying that crazy “config mode” jumper on the Smackover 2 and even resorting to the Windows-based Extreme Tuning software. I mean, who uses that, amirite? No matter what he does, though, I don’t feel my Turbo multipliers changing at all.

Then, this guy is muttering something under his breath about “Intel Extreme,” overclocking, and his own ass. I didn’t quite catch it all, but next thing I know, I’m having my heatsink removed, being popped out of my socket, and getting dropped into a Gigabyte X58A-UD5. In no time, I’m running at 4.53GHz and 1.41875V. The nimrod even got me to boot into Windows at 4.67GHz, but I felt woozy and passed out a couple times, so he finally gave up. Phew. Next boot, I’m recovered and chewing through benchmarks like a table saw through a head of lettuce.

Oh, lookie there. Miss Sandy B. overclocks to 4.5GHz, too, but guess what? I’m faster at stock in all but one test. Then I turn on the afterburners, and it’s freaking over. I’m encoding H.264 video at nearly 60 FPS, while the little runts won’t let you watch it at half that rate.

Incidentally, later on some folks from Intel suggested using an older BIOS with the Smackover 2 to get me overclocked on that board. Apparently the production BIOS had a bug that didn’t allow multiplier changes to stick. Duh. I wanted to go back into the ol’ SO2 for another round, but I was told I had to come talk to you people first. Apparently, somebody thinks he’s on some kind of time schedule. Delusions of grandeur, I guess.