14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Sandy Bridge series of central processing units was recently moved up, because the company's partners supposedly found it very promising. Apparently, the IT player revised its roadmap somewhat and will unveil the first chips before the year is out. This might goad some end-users into believing that the Santa Clara, California-based CPU maker would pour all its efforts into just bringing this line to market as quickly as possible. This doesn't seem to be the case though. In fact, it appears that a new CPU from the 'regular' Core family has just started selling. It goes by the name of Core i5-760.
The i5-760 is its maker's latest Lynnfield quad-core offering and, even in absence of an official press release, has started to show up on online stores. Basically, it is a sort of replacement for the Core i5-750. It is based on the 45nm manufacturing process technology and lacks an integrated graphics core.
Like all of its peers, it is designed to operate on platforms based on the LGA 1156 socket. Its four cores are each clocked at 2.80 GHz, which is a notable improvement over the 2.66 GHz of the aforementioned Core i5-750.
Unlike some of the higher-end parts, the product does not feature Hyper Threading, but it does have support for Virtualization technology and 64 bit data width. Furthermore, the chip comes with 8 MB of L3 cache and, of course, the integrated dual-channel DDR3 memory controller. Other specifications include a QPI of 4.8 GT/s and a TDP (thermal design power) of 95 W.
The Newegg listing can be found here. The product is priced at $209.99 and comes bundled with the necessary heatsink and fan, for cooling. Also, the CPU is backed by a 3-year parts and labor warranty. Finally, In Europe, the same product is supposedly priced at roughly 198 Euro.