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Intel Core i7 2600K and Core i5 2500K review

Rating: 9.5.

The release of Intel's second generation of Core Processors has been a hot topic of conversion among the enthusiast audience now for many months. They have a total of twenty nine new chips reaching retail and today KitGuru will be looking at the i5-2500k and the i7-2600k, both of which have fully unlocked cores.

The new Sandybridge architecture is a ‘tock' in the tick-tock cycle and its based on the 32nm microarchitecture, new highlights include improved energy efficiency and a new set of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) for enhanced floating point intensive application performance. With claims of over 30% performance improvements compared to the last generation, there certainly seems to be a lot on offer.

Today, our coverage is slightly condensed, due to the fact that at the last moment Intel brought the NDA forward, a time period we had originally planned to use for overclocking and power analysis. We therefore plan to follow this article up in the future with a more indepth look at certain aspects of the technology, as well as an analysis of the overclocking capabilities (we have a few hours before launch time, so we might get something done in another article before then).

New Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor Range (LGA 1155):

Core i7 Extreme Edition Processor
Mobile: i7-2920XM

Core i7 Processors
Mobile: i7-2820QM, i7-2720QM, i7-2630QM, 2635QM, i7-2620M, i7-2649M, i7-2629M (aka LV) , i7-2657M, i7-2617M (aka ULV)
Desktop: i7-2600K, i7-2600S, i7-2600

Core i5 Processors
Mobile: i5-2540M, i5-2520M, i5-2410M, i5-2537M (aka ULV)
Desktop: i5-2500K, i5-2500S, i5-2500T, i5-2500, i5-2400, i5-2400S, i5-2390T, i5-2300

Core i3 Processors
Mobile: i3-2310M
Desktop: i3-2120, i3-2100, i3-2100T

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14 comments

  1. Wow, those are mega processors. have to get me one

  2. Great article and they really are good improvements. poor amd 🙁

  3. These are certainly impressive, especially considering the price points they have achieved, which I certainlyw asnt expecting.

  4. Compared to the last generation they have certainly delivered much faster processors. I wasnt expecting such huge gains

  5. That ASRock fatal1ty board looks stunning doesnt it ? Very impressive overall platform from everyone involved.

  6. Thumbs up from me. waiting in line like everyone else for my chip now 🙂

  7. Those intel boards are really nice designs, they seem to getting better and better as the years and releases continue.

  8. Well I had almost bought a 1100T from AMd, and now I really don’t know what to do 🙁 these are so damn good and the price points are excellent. the 1100T costs around the same as the 2600K and it wont really go past 4.3ghz.

  9. There is a clear reason Intel are market leaders, and this is a good showcase of why.

  10. Excellent, count me in when I get the funds up.

  11. AMD need to answer this with something good in 2011, but I am not sure they can anymore. I remember the good old days of FX processors when they led the way. whatever happened 🙁

  12. not that much faster than the 2010 core cpu’s people who say they are are complete idiots on avg perormance increase is about 10%

  13. Francis, you’re completely wrong, it’s not that much faster at all, it’s anywhere between -5( meaning slower) to +10 as john already stated