Intel's Sandy Bridge Tested - i7 2700K at 5GHz is FAST!!

[@StaelTek]

Sandy Bridge was really ahead of its time back in the day. While struggling in AAA games made after 2019, it had a fantastic run for at least 7 years.

[@Sam-K]

It nearly destroyed AMD, I must say. Their Bulldozer was pretty much DOA as it was meant to go up against Nehalem. AMD just couldn't anticipate Sandy Bridge's remarkable IPC uplift. I did a little testing a while back and an SB i7 clocked at just 2.4GHz can keep-up with 3.0GHz Yorkfield quads, like the Q9650, in Cinebench. That's a 25% IPC uplift in a little over 2 years.

[@StaelTek]

@@Sam-K regarding Cinebench, did you remember to turn off hyperthreading on the i7 vs the Q9650, or are you talking about single threaded runs?

[@Sam-K]

​@@StaelTek Yep, both HT and turbo were disabled. 'Pure' 4 cores / 4 thread running at 2.4GHz. For reference, the CPU managed 179/703 in R20 and 465/1805 in R23. That's basically within margin of error of Core 2 Quad Q9650 at stock clocks.

[@StaelTek]

@@Sam-K sound about right. Haven’t tested my own Q9650 for ages but it’s not far off your numbers at stock. Memory setup on both?

[@Sam-K]

@@StaelTek 1,333 MHz DDR3 dual-channel @ 9-9-9-24.

[@Sam-K]

You can squeeze quite a bit more performance out of these old CPUs by disabling Meltdown/Specter vulnerability patch. I believe Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPUs were hit the worst by the patch. Anyhow, got a Xeon E3-1245 (i7-2600 @ -100MHz) a while back for $7 and I must say it's a great little CPU for the price. Wish I'd an overclockable motherboard as it can be OC'd up to 3.8GHz, all cores, for a little more kick. Still, I wouldn't recommend buying Sandy/Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs in 2023. These old quads just don't cut it anymore and the X79/X99 motherboards are just far too expensive for what they are.

[@m8x425]

100% True about InSpectre

[@LawrenceTimme]

Sandy was the best 💪😎 5ghz air cooled, soldered ihs, massive oc head room, really easy to run, very snappy.

[@nexus_tech]

Agreed🙂

[@wakesake]

One of the best CPU generations ever: -Low power consumption / cool running -Crazy Fast -Very good OC capability -Cheap Man back then PC gaming hardware was great and worth buying new

[@Obie327]

Early March of 2011 was a special year with Sandy Bridge and with my shiny new 2600k. Still have it in its original configuration/Case and a Zotac GTX 680. (4.2ghz, 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance 1600 mhz, And a Zalman 9900X air cooler) I'm impressed Nexus by the fancy motherboard and 2133 mhz ram you paired with it. Thanks for the review!

[@acid3129]

I have my i7 2700k still in a sapphire pure platinum z68 board with 2 sapphire r9 270x vapor x in crossfire still in its coolermaster cosmos 1000 case I used it up until 2021 when I got an i5 11600kf and later a 6700xt I'm hoping this lasts me another 10 or so years

[@RuruFIN]

Funny how I didn't have the luck to get a Sandy which overclocks to 5GHz until this year, and it's even a 2500K. Even 5.2GHz is stable :)

[@Loundsify]

Do you think it's because cases are so much cooler in terms of air intake Vs cases from 2012?

[@ciobi4947]

@@Loundsify I think it's because as of 2012 intel was either unwilling to push every cpu to it's limit or they just did something right with sandy and ivy bridge, something that with future cpu generation was either not viable or not profitable from their standpoint. After all why would they allow us to keep a cpu for 8 to 10 years without upgrading?

[@Turbolego]

I got 100% achievements on Cyberpunk 2077 using my ol' i7-2600k (4.4GHz OC) + GTX 1070, and that was on the 1.2 patch.

[@kazza3038]

sandy bridge is a beautifully aging cpu architecture

[@Sam-K]

As a Sandy Bridge owner, I must say the architecture has aged. Thinking about moving up to at least a Zen2 as Ryzen 5 3600s and B450s are getting pretty cheap lately. Would be nice to finally have a CPU with an unlocked clock multiplier for a change!

[@someboringperson9359]

​@@Sam-KAs an ex Ivy Bridge owner, I totally agree with you. It definitely aged but not terribly bad. It still can somewhat do modern tasks and gaming although not even as close to good as before. I upgraded to Ryzen 5 5500 and oh boi did that make a difference(night and day).

[@kazza3038]

@@Sam-K worth it I had 5600g great cpu

[@MrBudbubba]

I have this CPU in a backup computer that's in the closet collection dust. I built it a long time ago in 2012 with a water cooler, Asus P8P67 deluxe, 12gb memory, and I believe a GTX 560ti. I went overkill on the CPU with the plans of just upgrading the GPU over the years as needed. It started to show it's age when Battlefield 1 came out when I had to overclock it to 4.8GHZ to stop bottlenecking the GPU. It got handed down to my kid 3 years ago with a GTX 1060 when I built a Ryzen gaming rig and got put into storage last year when I built the kid a Ryzen gaming rig as well.

[@forcedcobra]

2500k from launch until I replaced it with the 9900k. 580gtx, 970gtx, and finally the 1070gtx all on the 2500k OC and had a blast through Skyrim and Fallout 4.

[@LedNe0nDevil]

To think smart people upgraded cpu's every generation since then, for gaming. Me: i7-870 since 2010 and going.

[@SlowHardware]

Would you test the i7 6950x? It still holds up amazing

[@ESKATEUK]

So basically for 4k gaming you could use a 2700k and get away with it. That’s mad.

[@m8x425]

Those were the good old days. I bought the 2600k after the Cougar Point issue was resolved and I rolled with it for a year until I gave it to my daughter. Overclocked to 4.8GHz, first try, Prime95 stable. 1.345v. It put Nehalem to shame. I rolled the Overclock back to 4.3GHz because that was the sweet spot for voltage, cooling, and workloads. During the lockdowns I bought a broken system with a later released 2600k and a GTX 970, but I had to put effort into getting it to 4.6GHz. Once the 2700k came out, you weren't going to get a good overclock out of the 2600k.

[@NinTech]

OMG! What a beast Sandy Bridge🤩💪🏻Few months ago I have tested the i7 3930k at 4.7GHz with quadchannel ram running at 2133mhz and an Rx 5700 xt: it was impressive!😳 In some instances beated my Ryzen 7 3700X!! Now that i've got an RTX 3090 might re do all the tests😉😎

[@Lurch-Bot]

I've been wanting to do some 2nd and 3rd gen overclocking but I need to get a Z77 MB. I have a 2500k but I also want to get a 3770K and use it to build a gaming rig for my bedroom. I have a 1080 FTW I want to keep as part of my permanent collection and an overclocked 3770K would be a good match for that. Good luck with Bulldozer. I've never used it but I think an FX 8350 / HD7950 build would be a neat thing to add to my collection. It would be alright for running emulation, although I think I would be undervolting the crap out of it if I was actually going to use it regularly.

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

I had a Sandy Bridge but it was just the Pentium G620. I later got an Ivy Bridge 3570K though and eventually I had a 2500K for a short time in a secondary system before giving it away.

[@HerrAlien]

Ok, I'll be the arse this time around: Is "Deus Ex: Mankind" supposed to be "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided" ?

[@nexus_tech]

Correct 🙂

[@elfo7]

Good video, I am absolutely amazed by the 2700K performance, whoever got one back in the day really got every $ value. It runs Cyberpunk at almost 100 fps... I would love to see some more extended gameplay with this cpu too.

[@oyunlar08]

Good to see sandy bridge still goin' good! (i'm even using i7 2600k now)

[@solemnsilence3650]

I had a i7 2600k back in the day overclocked to 4.5ghz it lasted me soooo long ❤

[@drupiROM]

2700K one of my preferred CPUs i never had :) Glad you channel is growing, you deserve it. I got my 3770K in 2013 and kept it in my rig until late 2017 and then until 2021 in a family member's PC for usual stuff like browsing and office work. It is now delided with liquid metal and sitting in a box waiting for me to pull it out for some more fun OC sessions. Yes, back then CPU's were fun to overclock and you could really gain performance, not the measly 5% you get with today's hardware.

[@m8x425]

5:23 .... I have a couple of those x299 processors and they really are not great with gaming. They're not much better than Zen+ at stock, and Zen 2 with a Good overclock. Their gaming performance is hindered by the Mesh Interconnect, while Sandy Bridge and most everything released afterward uses the Ring Bus. About a year and a half ago I bought a Core i9-7960x from China, which is a Silicon Lottery winner. Even after being delidded, and overclocked to 4.8GHz on all cores, it can't touch an untuned Ryzen 5950x.

[@finnbianga4189]

My first gaming pc also had a sandy bridge cpu, the classic i5 2500

[@mark902]

i used a q6600 based system until i upgraded to an r5 3600 based system in 2019. i totally get it. i was considering a new system around the 6th gen intel stuff (seemed fitting to go from a q6600 to an i5 6600), but i just ended up slapping an ssd into that q6600 build and it felt like a new pc so i held off.

[@baron61109]

Can you do a benchmark and game fps test with gtx 1650... with this cpu

[@searchiemusic]

holding my old one right now! debating using it for offloading some older plugins in a server rack >:3c

[@undeath6010]

well. my local minecraft server with skyfactory 3 mod pack still runns on a overclockt 2600k ^^ soo yea. good chip

[@wawaweewa9159]

daymm not bad, especially with like a RX5700, 1080ti or something

[@thorgraum1462]

my first desktop also had the 2700k i miss it like i miss my Audi a4 B5 1.8TQ

[@DanielCardei]

Great value in this 2700k even today. Awesome benchmark 👌

[@SpeedIng80]

Great video! Could you add 3rd, 4th, 5th ... gen of i7-CPUs to the comparison?

[@nexus_tech]

Thank you, mate! Yes, that's the plan going forward 🙂

[@wakesake]

i had em and the Second gen was/is the best 3rd gen was more of a mobile/laptop focused 4th was ok it added some instructions sets but nothing special 5th gen was good because of the added cache and it had great integrated gpu 6th gen was a nice jump 7th gen was dead in the water, Ryzen raped it 8th gen was a nice jump 6cores 9th gen was very good 9900k 10th gen was a good on but getting hot 11th was a flop 12th was ok 13th is furnace 14th is hot as hell with nothing worth over the 13th the crazy thing abouth the second gen i7 was that it matched the previous gen hedt cpu like the 980x/990x for one third of the price (btw i LOVE X58)

[@SpeedIng80]

@@wakesake Well, actually I think that 4th and 5th gen have been quite good steps forward, 6th gen rather no step, 7th moderate, and 8th was a huge leap then. 9th nothing special, 10th and 12th fine, but everything after that rather forgettable. But I'm no expert, that's just what I saw here on youtube ... Personally I'm still using my good ol' 5th gen Xeon (similar to the 5775c), which is doing fine even with modern games at 1080p/60. I'm not into raytracing and 4K, so I think I'll use it for some more years with my 1080ti. If there will be titles like Alan Wake 2, I just play other ones ...

[@Mini-z1994]

The fx series processors both the x100 & x300 series chips benefits from memory, northbridge & HT link speed so worth testing those processors with a 2.4 ghz ht link speed & northbridge link speed.

[@patrickc8007]

Wouldnt change shit here, couple % max.

[@ProcessedDigitally]

@@patrickc8007 single digit % at best

[@patrickc8007]

@@ProcessedDigitally Yup, its just a shite CPU and people should finally deal with it.

[@ProcessedDigitally]

@@patrickc8007 true. The only saving grace is that it was cheap (had to).

[@StaelTek]

@@patrickc8007i tested a few FX CPUs from my collection. And while going to 2600 MHz NB/HT link did help a bit in games, mostly in 1% lows, it’s not a massive improvement. (Tested with FX 4170, 6300 and 8120). But they do benefit decently with high speed memory, but only to a point.

[@TheAnoniemo]

"I use an RTX3080 as a GPU bottleneck" I think you mean "... to remove a GPU bottleneck"

[@nexus_tech]

That's right 🙂 Thank you, only just realised 😅

[@marcustaylor670]

The 2600k will often beat gen1 Ryzen when comparing overclocks. I sent my 1700x back it was so weak even with a 3.9ghz oc and 2900 memory. Even a well tuned and oc’d AMD FX beats gen1 Ryzen in some instances. AMD did provide competition in the form of super cheap CPU’s. I paid £65 new for a fx6300 where my i5 4670k was £165 for about 15 percent more performance with both CPU’s OC’d on ROG boards as hard as I could push them at the time. The gap would be a bit bigger now as I’m better at overclocking Haswell but even so Intel was not good value. The top motherboard was only £150 on AMD but over £200 for the Intel equivalent too. It took more knowledge and effort to get FX to work well but the rewards were there and more significant than any on Intel if you put the time in. FX6300 is my favourite cpu of all time and gave me my best liquid nitrogen results.

[@hugotakayama6963]

i7 2600k the ipc is lower than the R7 1800x, it reaches 4.1ghz in overclock, while the 2600k can exceed 4.7ghz but with good motherboards it can exceed that figure, however even if it reaches 5ghz it cannot exceed 1800x in performance and in games.

[@m8x425]

@@hugotakayama6963 I've had four Sandy Bridge K processors, not counting the x79 Sandy Bridge Xeon E5-1660 and 3930k. The worst ones hit 4.5GHz comfortably, but the better ones can go to 4.8GHz to 4.9GHz. I've been told very few 2600k/2700k processors can hit 5.0GHz at 1.35v, and run Prime95 stable.... maybe 1 or 2 out of one hundred.... and an exceptional board with good VRM's would be needed. My Sabertooth board was not nearly as good at overclocking as my Gigabyte G.1 Sniper or WS Revolution boards.

[@marcustaylor670]

The Ivy bridge is about 10 percent faster at same clocks, it won’t overclock as much so not much quicker. Haswell is 10 percent quicker again but as the 4770k won’t often OC that well the Sandy and Ivy bridge are faster in some instances like older versions of cinebench. In real life the Haswell OC’d is about 15 to 20 percent quicker than the Sandy OC. I have a Kaby Lake which overclocks just like my 2600k did, best 4c 8t ever.

[@boogieman20]

Look at 4 and 6000 series with avx

[@NomadJRG]

Sandybridge was the best, only upgraded my i5 2500k last year, had it running for over a decade at 5ghz! The overclocking improvements were just nuts, 30%+ in some cases.

[@mg_tv5448]

I downgraded from I7 3770K to 1600AF i should overclock it and buy 1440p monitor and performance will be higher ☠

[@lflyr6287]

The Sandy Bridge i7 2700K was hugely overrated puny 4-core chip with around 160 Watts of power consumption and quite melting temperatures. It's performance is many thanked due to hidden Shintel compilers in many game engines at the time and later on, games only utilizing 1-core and Shintels allowance of abnormal power consumption.

[@patrickc8007]

FX8350 - TRASH

[@lflyr6287]

@@patrickc8007 hahahaha buttercup....yet today in modern games the FX 8350 at stock clocks beats the i7 2700K in just about every game due to actually having 8c/8t which accounts for the multi-core usage in modern games. The FX 8350 has higher FPS, 1% lows and 0,1% lows than the crappy i7 2700K. That alone is what's the most important thing here :).

[@Pasi123]

@@patrickc8007 The FX-8350 was released half a year after i7-3770K. The real comparison to the i7-2700K would be the even worse FX-8150

[@LawrenceTimme]

Average AMDipper comment from 2012 : 😂😂😂

[@djukic921]

@@lflyr6287 Overclocked FX gives similar or worse performance to stock Sandy. Those cores give lower frametimes and they can utilize more processes yes, but the FX is definitely not faster than Sandy. Search for RA Tech channel and there you will find comparisson between FX 8000 series cpu and intel 2 core 4 thread one and you will se what I am talking about.