Sandy Bridge Buyer’s Guide

Closing Remarks

As discussed in the introduction, right now is an especially wise time to buy into a Sandy Bridge system given that the platform is mature, offers lots of options for all sorts of users, and is unlikely to get knocked off the top of the performance hill for many months. Sandy Bridge-E will come out around Q4, but the primary target will be workstations and users running highly threaded workloads; for dual-core and quad-core setups (including Hyper-Threading), socket LGA-1155 should last well into next year. As a final recap, here’s where we see the markets heading in the near future.

At the low-end, we have Intel’s Core i3 parts. From the early numbers, including pricing, it’s unlikely that AMD’s Llano CPUs will best the Core i3s in terms of sheer computational prowess; however, it also seems clear that Llano’s graphics will be substantially better than Intel’s integrated offerings. In other words, if you are not going to be using a discrete GPU, it would be wise to wait a few weeks and see how desktop Llano shapes up. Considering that the vast majority of desktop users do not need a discrete graphics card now, most of your family, friends, and customers could use Llano as a do-everything, entry-level gaming setup; if they don’t care about games at all, Core i3 likely wins out.

Moving up to the next tier, those who want more capable CPUs and discrete GPUs can jump to or near the top of the performance pile now and stay there for at least a couple month. Come September, AMD’s Bulldozer will finally show up, hopefully providing an answer to Intel’s higher-end Core i5 and Core i7 processors. We’re still a few months away from Bulldozer, however, so if you’re itching to buy or upgrade now is as good a time as any we’re likely to see.

At the very top of the performance heap, we still don’t know what to expect from Bulldozer, and Intel will have a potential counter with Sandy Bridge-E. Depending on the workload, either or both platforms will likely surpass the current crop of i7-2600K systems. While we’re not quite sure where Bulldozer pricing will fall, it’s a safe bet (judging by where LGA-1366 launched) that LGA-2011 platforms will carry a significant price premium over today’s LGA-1155 offerings. If you’re still hanging on to an early Bloomfield X58 setup, though, you should be able to wait for the SNB-E launch before deciding whether to jump onto the mainstream bandwagon or stick with Intel’s high-end enthusiast platform.