Nov 24, 2010 13:55 GMT  ·  By

After months and months of leaks and rumors, a Chinese publication has finally got a hold of an Intel Core i7 2600K Sandy Bridge-based processor and put it through an extensive suite of benchmarks giving us the very first insight into Intel's second generation Core processor performance.

For those of you that have been living under a rock for this last few months, Sandy Bridge is the name of Intel's upcoming processor architecture that is scheduled to be launched more that a month from now, on January 5 2011, during CES.

But this hasn't stopped a Chinese website, called inpoi.com.cn, from getting a hold of a top of the line Intel Core i7 2600K processor and put it trough an extensive collection of benchmarks against a present day Core i7 875K.

In order to make for a fair comparison, the Chinese website overclocked the 875K to the same frequency as the Sandy Bridge-based 2600K, namely 3.4GHz, both of these CPUs coming with Intel's own Hyper-Threading technology as well as with 8GB of L3 cache memory.

Moving past the 15 or so pages detailing the benchmarks run on the 2600K and moving right away to the conclusions, reveals that although Sandy Bridge does offer a speed increase when compared with the Lynnfiled based CPU, this isn't as large as everybody has though, some applications witnessing only a 3% speed increase.

On the other hand, 3D rendering and video encoding scores see a 10% increase, the biggest advantage over Lynnfield coming in StarCraft 2 where the 2600K manages to surpass its rival by a whopping 25%.

However, you have to bear in mind that these processors were clocked at the same speed, normally the 2600K holding an impressive speed advantage when compared to the 875K (2.93GHz for the 875K vs 3.4GHz for the 2600K) that should make the performance gap between the two even greater.

As far as overclocking the 2600K is concerned (the K at the end of the name stands for unlocked multiplier), the processor reached a not so impressive 4.7GHz, Sandy Bridge processors coming in with a locked clock gen that doesn't allow users to change the CPU's base clock.

End of it all, I will let you to read the rest of the Sandy Bridge 2600K review available right here, leaving you to draw your very own conclusions regarding Sandy Bridge.

Photo Gallery (4 Images)

Sandy Bridge CPU without heatspreder
Sandy Bridge Core i7 2600K vs Core i7 875K Banchmark Photoshop CS5Sandy Bridge Core i7 2600K vs Core i7 875K Banchmark H.264 Encoding
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