Intel Sandy Bridge Review

Testing

To test the Sandy Bridge CPUs we used the Asus P8P67 motherboard, which we'll review separately soon. To test the AMD CPUs we used the Asus Crosshair IV Formula motherboard which is an excellent overclocker and is based on the AMD 890FX chipset. This is a more expensive motherboard than the Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H that we used for the Intel LGA1156 CPUs but both boards allowed us to get the maximum performance from the CPUs on test. Our LGA 1366 test board is the awesome Asus P6TD Deluxe which again is a full ATX board.

Test Setup

Software

Below is a list of the applications we've used for our testing - most of them are available free for public consumption, although some are popular professional software applications.

• Crysis v1.21
  
• X3: Terran Conflict rolling demo v1.2.0.0
  
• WPrime v2.00
  
• Media Benchmarks v2007.235
  
• Maxon Cinebench 11.5 (x64)

We've used Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, as this is the most flexible and reliable 64-bit OS for testing the applications above.

Test Hardware

• ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card (Catalyst 10.11 WHQL)
  
• 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard disk
  
• PC Power & Cooling Silncer 750W PSU
  
• Asus P8P67 Intel LGA1155 motherboard
  
• Asus P6TD Deluxe Intel LGA1366 motherboard
  
• Asus Crosshair IV Formula AMD Socket AM3 motherboard
  
• Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H Intel LGA1156 motherboard
  
• 4/6GB (3 x 2GB) Corsair 1,600MHz DDR3 memory (CL9)
  
• Titan Fenrir TTC-NK85TZ CPU cooler, except for LGA1155 systems where we use a Corsair H50 due to the incompability between the Fenrir and Asus P8P67 motherboard