Conclusions

We conclude this first part of the analysis of the new Intel platform, appreciating the excellent performance of this CPU, as indeed one would expect from a esacore based on Sandy Bridge architecture. The LGA 2011 platform presents some very interesting aspects, but also some negative aspects. The introduction of PCI Express 3.0 is definitely a great news, especially for the large number of lines present, which makes the platform suitable for high-level gaming systems, with the possibility of having up to 4 video cards with high bandwidth up to well 500MB/s (PCI-E 3.0 x8). Very good the operation of the Turbo Boost technology that allows the frequency increases up to 600 MHz for single-threaded applications, making the CPU very efficiently in even the older generation application, where the multi-core is not exploited.

Intel still has room for improvement, because, as mentioned, the Sandy Bridge-E CPUs integrate 8 cores already inside them, although two have been disabled. The position of advantage over the competition allowed it to not speed up the development too much, giving up to many features of the x79 chipset to avoid potential errors such as happened with the bug of the P67. Precisely under the aspect of storage connections, the x79 chipset is very poor, resulting in fact similar to the Z68 and P67 chipset, with only two 6 Gb/s SATA ports. The Intel controller is among the fastest embedded controllers, but AMD had already in his chipset up to 6 6Gb/s SATA ports and up to 4 USB 3.0.

Before making a final evaluation on this platform, the staff of XtremeHardware have decided to make more extensive testing, which previously were not possible because of the short time available. These tests will assess the SLI performance, the impact of the memory frequency and number of channels, and finally the impact of overclocking on the performance.

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Conclusions

We conclude this first part of the analysis of the new Intel platform, appreciating the excellent performance of this CPU, as indeed one would expect from a esacore based Sandy Bridge architecture. The LGA 2011 platform presents some very interesting aspects, but also some negative aspect. The introduction of PCI Express 3.0 is definitely a great news, especially for the large number of lines present, which makes the platform suitable for high-level gaming systems, with the possibility of having up to 4 video cards with high bandwidth up to well 500MB/s (PCI-E 3.0 x8). Very good the operation of the Turbo Boost technology that allows the frequency increases up to 600 MHz for single-threaded applications, making the CPU very efficiently in even the older generation application, where the multi-core is not exploited.

Intel still has room for improvement, since as mentioned, the Sandy Bridge CPU-E integrates 8 cores already inside them, although two have been disabled. The position of advantage over the competition allowed it to not press the accelerator too much, giving up to many features of the x79 chipset to avoid potential errors such as happened with the bug of the P67. Precisely under the aspect of storage connections, the x79 chipset is very poor, resulting in fact not unlike the Z68 and P67 chipset, with only two 6 Gb/s SATA ports. The Intel controller is among the fastest embedded controllers, but AMD had for long in his chipset up to 6 6Gb/s SATA ports and up to 4 USB 3.0.  

Before making a final decision on this platform, the staff of XtremeHardware decided to make more extensive testing, which previously were not possible because of the short time available. These tests will be to assess the SLI performance, the impact of the memory frequency and number of channels, and finally the impact of overclocking on the performance.