Sandy Bridge i7 & i5 Reviews

[Manicdan]

Yes, i saw it. But in fact "lost of sharpness" affected nothing except much better looking edges (especially white line on the police car) after SB hardware transcoding. So i guess this is not just a "lost of sharpness" but some kind of hardware post-processing mentioned at IDF.

i think the batman example looked great
the bond one however was identical between the x86 and 6870, yet the batman one was clearly having different brightness between the two, so i dont know if a setting got messed up or what

this is a nice feature to have and i hope that amd fusion bring competition here so we get better and better quality and speeds in the next few years

also did they ever compare file sizes between all the end results?

[DarthShader]

the test was compared across mulitple platforms, and only SB had losses in the game when cinebench was using up more cores

At first, I'd think it's a trival case of being starved for memory bandwidth. But if you say only SB showed this behavior, then I'd say it's the L3 cache... so memory starving after all. The IGP sharing the cache seems to be a big deal for SB - Dr.Who even suggested the IGP will challenge Llano thanks to it. First step towards this goal has been done - the HD5450 is challenged.

There are surely some sophisticated algorithms taking care of dividing the available cache among the IGP and cores, depending on needs. If your cores aren't heavily taxed, then most cache is probably reserved for the IGP. At full load, the cores need the cahce to handle it, not much left for IGP, effective bandwidth drops, performance plumets.

QuickSync is pretty good at what it's designed for but there is one big issue with it : you can't use it on desktop if you have discrete gfx card in your system. AT indicates that intel may be preparing some sort of switch (software?) later on,so it may be resolved.

Well, LucidLogix already announced a software switching sollution for SB. But to work, you will need a monitor plugged in the mobo's video socket. This means, you need to have a mobo with a video socket. (duh)

That means P67 users will have to use traditional x86 encoding on their machines.

[Raqia]

Do any of these reviews feature a GTA IV bench?

[Mad1723]

Do any of these reviews feature a GTA IV bench?

Hardware.fr does feature that test, quite a nice improvement over i7 9xx