i7 2600k, i5 2500k & 2300 1155 Sandy Bridge Review

3D Mark Vantage

When we tested these chips on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme, review should be live along with this one, we were amazed by the relatively poor performance of the board and chips in the 3D environment and postulated if it was symptomatic of the board itself. Considering how comparatively weak the 3D Mark Vantage results are even on this highly refined Intel board we’re definitely getting a little concerned at the interaction of the various components. All the scores are consistently below those of the 45nm setups.

3D Mark 11

3D Mark 11 is a much more strenuous test of your system and yet despite using a much more theoretically modern system with an identical GPU the scores remain underneath our i7-870 and i7-950 systems. Although both the i5s could be argued as not having the hyper-threading necessary for big synthetic scores, the 5GHz i7-2600K has absolutely nothing holding it back from topping the charts by some margin.