| Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge CPU |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Processors | |
| Written by Hank Tolman | |
| Sunday, 02 January 2011 | |
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Page 4 of 13
CPU Testing and ResultsBefore I begin any benchmarking or overclocking, I thoroughly stress the CPU and memory by running Prime95 on all available cores for 12 hours. If no errors are found, I move on to a gaming stress test. To do this, I use Prime95 again to stress the processor, while running an instance of FurMark's stability test on top of this. If the computer survives this test for 2 hours without lockup or corruption, I consider it to be stable and ready for overclocking. After achieving what I feel is stable overclock, I run to these tests again for certainty. The goal of this stress testing is to ensure the clock speeds and settings are stable before performing any benchmarks. I adopted this method from another writer here at Benchmark Reviews and it seems to do a great job of flushing out what only seem to be stable overclocks.
Once the hardware is prepared, we begin our testing. Each benchmark test program begins after a system restart, and the very first result for every test will be ignored since it often only caches the test. This process proves extremely important in the many gaming benchmarks, as the first run serves to cache maps allowing subsequent tests to perform much better than the first. Each test is completed five times, with the average results displayed in our article. We are going to focus here mainly on comparing the test results from the Core i5-2500K against the Phenom-II X4-975BE since that is the AMD processor that the Core i5-2500K relates to most closely in price. Also, it will be interesting to see the results of the Core i5-2500K in comparison to the Core i7-920, an extremely popular Nehalem CPU that still holds a large market share. Intel H67 Test Platforms
Intel X58 Test Platform
AMD 890GX Test Platform
Benchmark Applications
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Comments
Either way I am most likely going to get the i5 2500k since it is very strong. Also the price is rather cheap at $211 when currently the i5 750 is $200 and the i5 760 is about $209 dollars. Since I did not upgrade following the first i series I would need to get a new motherboard anyway.Integrated graphics means little to me since as a gamer I would get a higher end GPU regardless. I just have to make sure the motherboard is p67 not H67 for overclocking and such.
Anyway nice read, thanks for the article.