| Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge CPU |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Processors | |
| Written by Hank Tolman | |
| Sunday, 02 January 2011 | |
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SiSoftware Sandra Benchmark TestsSiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what's really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. The SANDRA DhryStone and Whetstone tests are CPU tests that run completely within the CPU + cache memory itself. These tests are perfect for seeing general efficiency per processing core. Dhrystone is basically a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs and is an older CPU tests. Even so, it remains a simple and accurate way to show RAW CPU processing performance. The whetstone benchmark primarily measures floating-point arithmetic performance. 
The two SiSoftware Sandra tests we used are both Arithmetic tests. As we mentioned before, Intel put a lot of effort into revamping the way the Sandy Bridge CPUs handle arithmetic processes. We should see their effort pay off here. The Dhrystone test suite results in quite a large gap in performance between the Core i5-2500K and the Phenom-II X4-975BE with the Sandy Bridge CPU holding more than a 65% advantage over the AMD CPU. When compared to the Core i7-920, the i5-2500K holds onto a lead of almost 4% in the Dhrystone tests. The Whetstone tests put the Phenom-II X4-975BE a lot closer to the i5-2500K, this time only trailing by about 18%. Alternately, the Core i5-2500K fails to supersede the Core i7-920 in the Whetstone tests, trailing by about 16%.
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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.