Intel Core i7 3820 and ASrock Extreme4-M review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell January 11, 2012 CPU, Highlights-new, Motherboard

SiSoftware 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.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

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.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

SMP – Multi-Processor
MC – Multi-Core
SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

Great all round performance, at the same level as the 2700k, except in the memory bandwidth test where it is significantly faster, falling in behind the Intel Core i7 3960X system at almost 40 GB/s.

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Senior Intel Engineer Explains the Radical Shift in CPU Design

When Intel launched Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200V) in 2024 we gave you the technical details and followed up with a review of the Asus Zenbook S 14 which has incredible battery life. In the following month we discussed Intel Arrow Lake (Core Ultra 200S) and how we considered it was unfit for review in a situation that was not resolved until February 2025. On the one hand we have Lunar Lake which we like, while on the other hand we have Arrow Lake which is troubled, yet both families of processors run on Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores and have a huge amount in common.

7 comments

Tim
January 11, 2012 at 2:50 pm

Nice CPU, but im happy with my 2500k. hope it lasts at least another year with the games I play !
Rupert
January 11, 2012 at 2:52 pm

Very nice indeed. I like the asrock board, most of the p67 micro atx boards sucked
Hunglow
January 11, 2012 at 2:57 pm

Interesting to see them releasing a CPU at the same price as the 2600k for the X79 platform. Wasnt expecting that.
Scott Pendrey
January 12, 2012 at 4:45 pm

It looks like the Cyberlink MediaEspresso tests didn’t use Intel Quick Sync Video on the Intel Core i5 2500K or Core i7 2600K/2700K systems. Those processors would appear higher up the table if that was enabled and used.
Paul henry
September 12, 2013 at 4:10 am

Well l have the asrock extreme 4 m with 16 gb trip memory with 2xssd two hard drives all in raid 0 with 6600it x2 fps battlefield 148fps 17_3820 CPU ut very fast it for sale
07592340571 paul