Intel Core i7-2600K and i5-2500K Processors Debut

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory to DDR3-1333. The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2011B Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2011B, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2011 suite with Intel's new Core i5 and i7 "Sandy Bridge" processors (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory).  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds of 3.3GHz (2500K) and 3.4GHz (2600K) with 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard.
 

Core i5-2500K Processor	Core i5-2500K Multimedia	Core i5-2500K Memory Bandwidth	Core i5-2500K Cache & Memory
Core i7-2700K Processor	Core i7-2700K Multimedia	Core i7-2700K Memory Bandwidth	Core i7-2700K Cache & Memory

The new Sandy Bridge-based Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K processors performed right about where we expected them too in the various SiSoft SANDRA tests. In the Processor Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmarks, the processors outpaced their previous-generation counterparts by a fair margin, when core counts were similar--the 6-core Core i7-980X remains Intel's fastest processor overall. The Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K also performed similarly in the Cache and Memory test and each one offered up about 16GB/s of peak memory bandwidth, when running in a dual-channel configuration at 1333MHz.