Intel Core i7 2700k Flagship Showdown Review

We’ve known for a little while now, that Intel had something up their sleeves with regards to Sandybridge and now that the cat is out of the bag, we can shout out that it’s the i7 2700k. Taking over as the Sandy Bridge flagship processor is quite vital information to us as we will now be using it for all of our Sandy Bridge based tests, and we can tell you now; that’s a lot.

The i7 2700k isn’t anything too spectacular as simply put, it’s a cherry picked 2600k with 100MHz extra speed, which reminds us very much of what AMD did with the Phenom II range of processors, periodically releasing processors with 100MHz faster clock speeds, and a slight bump in price. Why Intel have decided to go down this route is anyone’s guess, but for us, we simply believe it’s to keep that firm step on bulldozer, by giving it no chance to breathe.

As said, the i7 2700k is 100MHz faster than the 2600k, meaning that it comes with a 3.5GHz core clock speed, still maintains the socket 1155 structure and much like the 2600k, has a 95Watt TDP. Also much like the 2600k, it comes with four physical cores and hyperthreading allowing for 8 threads (2 per core) opposed to the likes of Bulldozer and the FX-8150 which has 8 physical cores, though we’ve seen from first hand information of the results from this.

So it seems that Intel have simply released a processor with a multiplier of 35x instead of the 34x multiplier that the 2600k sports, and with the 2600k easily able to achieve these speeds, we can only assume that this chip is here to spoil the launch of Bulldozer, but isn’t it true that AMD did that all by themselves?

What we will be doing today is having a bit of a showdown between the AMD FX-8150 and the new Intel Sandy Bridge Flagship i7 2700k, and whilst we’re aware of which will come out on top, we’re more interested to see by how much, and that’s why we’re putting the i7 2700k through its paces.