Maxwell Render | Official public forum

the first Sandy Bridge reviews are out

5GHz on air confirmed!!!

and it starts at ~$320 and ~$100 for a cheap motherboard

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/san ... ,2850.html

http://www.overclockers.com/intel-i7-26 ... dge-review

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/sandy-bri ... 90-15.html

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2 ... e-review/7

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/san ... 831-7.html

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/proz ... s_max_2011

Wonder when they'll be available...although its too bad that LGA 1155 will be limited to 4 cores. LGA 1356 and 2011 not due until Q3 at least

The 4 cores will be available any day now from what I have been reading here. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1574006

I wonder how a maxed overclock 2600k compares to a max overclocked 980x. Im using a i7920 overclocked to 3.4 right now, but am not sure what the price would be for a complete system upgrade to sandybridge versus just dropping a 980x into what I have now and overclocking. Ill proably just wait till 3rd quarter for the sandybridge 6 cores........

Eric Lagman wrote:The 4 cores will be available any day now from what I have been reading here. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1574006

I wonder how a maxed overclock 2600k compares to a max overclocked 980x. Im using a i7920 overclocked to 3.4 right now, but am not sure what the price would be for a complete system upgrade to sandybridge versus just dropping a 980x into what I have now and overclocking. Ill proably just wait till 3rd quarter for the sandybridge 6 cores........

From what I've seen on reviews, when it comes to single-socket rendering performance it will be:

LGA1366 6/8 core chips (Q32011) > 980x > 2600k > i7920

The 980x is the fastest out there right now including 2600k, but X58 is a bit of a dead end. Unfortunately so is LGA1155 as far as core count are concerned...

Eric Lagman wrote:The 4 cores will be available any day now from what I have been reading here. http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1574006

I wonder how a maxed overclock 2600k compares to a max overclocked 980x. Im using a i7920 overclocked to 3.4 right now, but am not sure what the price would be for a complete system upgrade to sandybridge versus just dropping a 980x into what I have now and overclocking. Ill proably just wait till 3rd quarter for the sandybridge 6 cores........

look at the cinebench results at bit-tech.net

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2 ... e-review/7

980x @ 3,33GHz = 8.95 points
2600K @ 4.85GHz = 9.42
980x @ 4,4GHz = 11.22

so an 2600K @ ~4,4 - 4,5GHz will be faster than a 980x @ stock
but an overclocked 980x will be still on top
...but for the money of a 980x sys you can buy 2-3 2600K sytems

dmeyer wrote:Wonder when they'll be available...although its too bad that LGA 1155 will be limited to 4 cores. LGA 1356 and 2011 not due until Q3 at least

yes, this is true - the 1155 is not the best choice

...they should be available next week

yep, looks very promising, I'll wait for the 6 and 8core Sandys though.

Ben

I'll buy a Sandy at next week.

I'm going to hold off on a major upgrade till the 8 cores drop, but anyone know if I can slap a 980X into a motherboard that currently has an i7 920 in it?
(can you tell I'm not tech savvy?)

b

yes, normally it should work - maybe your board needs a bios update. Look into your mainboard specs and the bios update info.

...but your update cost will be ~$1000 for ths 980x compared to ~$400-500 for the sandy and you get a higher power consumption

but the 980x is a very good chip, i still love it!

numerobis wrote:yes, normally it should work - maybe your board needs a bios update. Look into your mainboard specs and the bios update info.

...but your update cost will be ~$1000 for ths 980x compared to ~$400-500 for the sandy and you get a higher consumption

but the 980x is a very good chip, i still love it!

The chip is $400-$500 but he will need a new motherboard so that should be factored in as well. Not sure if you can use the same ram that was used on an i7920 board though.

Im in the same boat, but I think I will wait until the 8 cores come out since those will be a different motherboard as well. If the 980x magically dropped in price to $600 or so I would go ahead and get that, but I doubt that will happen.

as said before a 2600k starts at $319 and a board costs $100-$200...

yes you can use your ddr3 ram from the 920 for the sandy

Thanks guys. I hadn't even considered that the RAM would not work with a new chip - I'm pretty ignorant on the hardware side.

I will probably upgrade one 920 to a 980x as the difference in speed seems pretty significant. Eventually I'll add a new box with either the Sandybridge or possibly a dual Xeon rig. I'm considering going back to Xeons just to get more horsepower in a single box. I know you can build cheaper single chip boxes, but the added costs and hassle of building and maintaining hardware and software for full systems are getting less appealing to me.

Any opinions on whether the Sandy Bridge 8 cores will be a better bet than the current range of Xeons?

/b

I did an upgrade from a 920 to an 980X and the 980 completely trashes the 920 in any possible way. There's lots of headroom for overclocking too if you want to. At work I use a dual Xeon 5650 giving me 12cores and 24threads, but it is very (!)expensive. It only has a clockspeed of 2.66GHz and yet one CPUis more expensive than a 980X which clocks @3.33GHz. And you need two of those Xeons to run it properly...
Another factor that is often overlooked, is that your software might not be able to handle that many threads properly. I have not noticed such behaviourin Maxwell, but knowing that you also work in Vray-like I do at work- I noticed a drop in performance in heavy to superheavy scenes where thread management from Vray or Max was severly limiting the overall performance. Sometimes (I'd say in 20% of the cases) it was not possible to get it running an all 24 threads, meaning performance might not scale accordingly to cores/threads in certain scenarios.
To be fair though, it's still very fast even when not exploited to the fullest, yet I'd say it's not fast enough for the huge price.
I expect the highend Sandy's (8cores/16threads) to be well in the 1K$ range and I am fairly sure it will outperform above mentioned 24thread Xeon machine. It will certainly not be able to hold as much RAM on the desktop boards though, but it's able to use mainstream RAM as opposed to the more excotic ECC RAM required for workstation boards.

My future money is for sure on the highend Sandy Bridge's.

Ben

Thanks very much Ben - that is exactly the info I was looking for. I think for now I'll go for one 980X for my main workstation and later in the year I'll upgrade it and a few other nodes to SB.

I appreciate the input!

b

Ben thank you, thank you, thank you!

I'm upgrading this month and that is brilliant info! I'd wait for the 6/8s sandys but I've been waiting for every improvement for so long now I've just got to bite the bullet, particularly with a pretty high workload starting early this year!

I think the 990x is released this month so a week or two is an ok wait for that! So that's my plan!