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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