Sandy Bridge - E this week!

So it looks like Sandy Bridge E series chips may just be released this week. Seems (price inflated) pre-orders are appearing over the web.

I think this is quite an interesting upgrade for DAW users to consider, especially comparing to both the 9xx series chips to the current SB i72x00 series.

For me, the biggest thing in memory slots. Finally, X79 based boards will give us up to 8 slots of ram. I personally find the 4 slots avaliable to current sandybridge chips not enough (yes, its for sample instruments, and even my old mac pro 3,1 is running 32GB ram!)

That, and being able to use 6 cores at a reasonable frequency rate (3.2 and 3.3 before turbo boost on both 6 core chips) makes this quite an interesting platform.

I’m looking forward to seeing DAW benchmarks revisited with this new platform. I know there are many who have stuck with their 9xx based i7s (which are fine chips by all accounts) rather than go with the 2600Ks (or 2700 now etc) - perhaps there is now an alternative.

I am building a test machine as a precursor to a new rig for composing (which will likely be 2xpowerful sample slaves, or 4 to 6 low level sample slaves… i am going to have one of each for testing, and then will try figure out a way to evaluate their workflow. It also needs to be light-weight, and able to be taken onto flights, so that is a HUGE constraint in what I’m doing. Whatever solution it is, it will not be standard!)

Has anyone else got any early news on these chips? Boards?

Cheers! Brendan.

I’m looking at the 3930K cpu and and either Asus, Gigabyte, or Rampage depending on the price.

Things I’m concerned about:

  1. Stilll no USB 3.0 native support on the boards, which I’m unclear about and if it’s a bottleneck.

  2. The motherboards may not hold many after stock CPU coolers, like the silent noctua D14.

  3. 130 watts is a lot of power, and it will climb drastically when OC’d to 4ghz.

  4. Q1 of January there will be new x79 motherboards

have had them for some time now.
for video editing they are 11% faster than the first gen sandy. (pretty much quad vs 6 core)
4,5GHz OC is well within thermal limits.

having issues with DPC to get any real numbers below 256 buffer.
@ 256 they seem to be runing about the same 11% really hard to say at this point until DPC gets under control.

while i am already offering them for video they are not ready to go for audio…

You have the 2600k or the new x79 chipsets?

no… 3960X on X79… LOL

Why arent they audio ready?

Also maybe you can clear this up, are the cpus c3 stepping and going to be able to support xbox games on windows 8? i was really looking forward to this setup until hearing all the quirks.

Another thing is the mobos not being native usb 3.0 or UEFA

I guess ill have to wait and see