Intel isn’t bundling its Sandy Bridge-E-based Core i7s with a cooling solution of any sort. Perhaps the company surmised that few power users willing to drop 10 bills on a flagship processor stick with boxed heat sinks. Instead, it’s selling a closed-loop water cooler and cost-optimized heat sink/fan combination separately, allowing enthusiasts to pick between two options from Intel or a host of other third-party products.
Intel expects the liquid propylene glycol-based cooler, sourced from Asetek, to sell for somewhere between $85 and $100. That part is compatible with Sandy Bridge-, Ivy Bridge-, Sandy Bridge-E-, and future Ivy Bridge-E-based processors. Several other third-party liquid coolers are expected to accommodate motherboards with the LGA 2011 interface, too.
Intel’s heat sink and fan combo should go for less than $20, though that part is aimed at government and business customers who might look to Sandy Bridge-E for an entry-level workstation. That’s not to say there won’t be plenty of high-end air coolers for LGA 2011, though. Noctua sent us its NH-D14 SE2011 for our upcoming holiday gift guide, and we were able to get all six cores stable at 4.6 GHz running Prime95 for an hour with it on the Intel DX79SI board.
Now, I don’t put much stock in overclocking results from processors sent out to reviewers. But I spent some time polling system builders who were preparing to sell overclocked Sandy Bridge-E machines at launch, and it seems like 4.5 or 4.6 GHz is a realistic target for enthusiast-oriented PCs that (hopefully) won’t fizzle out and die within a month.
Overclocking Sandy Bridge-E
There are only three Sandy Bridge-E-based processors at launch, and only two of them are expected to be available. That pair of chips is multiplier-unlocked, making overclocking a fairly simple matter of setting a ratio and fine-tuning with BCLK settings.


The third model, Core i7-3820, isn’t unlocked, though. Instead, it’s “partially unlocked.” Intel lets you set a multiplier six bins higher than the highest Turbo Boost clock rate: 3.9 GHz. The result is a maximum of 4.5 GHz using ratios exclusively.
Unlike the Sandy Bridge/Cougar Point combination, however, the clock generator for this platform is external, which makes it easier for you to make BCLK modifications without running afoul of buses more sensitive to deviation. In order to facilitate this, you get a handful of strap ratios that increase the BCLK without pushing subsystems like PCI Express out of spec. In short, though Core i7-3820 overclocking is technically not unlocked, a combination of extra multiplier settings and PCIe/DMI ratios should make it possible to find the quad-core chip’s limit fairly freely, too.
- Say Hello To The PC Hardware Trophy Wife
- Quad-Channel Memory And PCI Express 3.0
- X79 Express: P67, Is That You?
- Cooling And Overclocking Core i7-3960X
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2011
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Crysis 2
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft
- Crysis 2 In SLI
- DiRT 3 In SLI
- World Of Warcraft In SLI
- Battlefield 3 In SLI
- Power Consumption
- Core i7-3960X Versus Core i7-990X
- Core i7-3960X Versus Core i7-2600K/Core i5-2500K
- Core i7-3960X Versus FX-8150
- A Symbolic King In A Crowd Full Of Value


The funny thing is that cores don't scale well. They do, but it's far from ideal as the percentages from the 2600K show (and the FX-8150 but that's a different story).
But the takeaway:
-If you're playing games the i5-2500K is the best purchase you can make and it's enough for Tri-580 SLI. Only WoW shows any difference, but most games ignore it.
-X79 is Intel being just plain lazy. No matter how you slice it- the X79 should have been called X67 and left like that. It's also a wildcat platform that will only support at most 6 CPUs that aren't terribly crippled.
-A Phenom II 955BE (or unlocked 960T, or a 1090T/1100T) is still a fine CPU to have unless you're gaming with dual graphics cards or doing time-intensive tasks.
What we have today is simply a platform for bragging rights not a serious contender to the X38, X48, X58 family.
I would LOVE to see them pick up their game and provide me with a worthy upgrade over my 4GHz i7 2600 (Non-K). I would swoop it up.
Look, BD had 4 modules with two "cores" each, each module is equivalent to a Sandy Bridge core.
They should just combine both of those cores or make them a single core, so we get 4 threads.
Then create 4-6-8 core versions of those CPU's..
Think about it.. the FX8150 is more of a 4-core CPU where the resources are halved pretty much so you get two threads per core, it would have been MUCH MUCH better if they just kept 4 strong cores.
Not sure why either but I always seem to start an AMD related comment :\
The labels are wrong on the graphs on this page the last ones should read DDR2-2133 on the last two shouldn't it?
JeanLuc
The only use for the 3820 really seems to be a cheap placeholder processor if you need a new PC now, but want to wait for a likely full 8c/16t version to come out around the time Ivy Bridge is released. The 3930k should prove to be a very good high end gaming/ mid range workstation part though for people who invest close to $1k in graphics cards.
The funny thing is that cores don't scale well. They do, but it's far from ideal as the percentages from the 2600K show (and the FX-8150 but that's a different story).
But the takeaway:
-If you're playing games the i5-2500K is the best purchase you can make and it's enough for Tri-580 SLI. Only WoW shows any difference, but most games ignore it.
-X79 is Intel being just plain lazy. No matter how you slice it- the X79 should have been called X67 and left like that. It's also a wildcat platform that will only support at most 6 CPUs that aren't terribly crippled.
-A Phenom II 955BE (or unlocked 960T, or a 1090T/1100T) is still a fine CPU to have unless you're gaming with dual graphics cards or doing time-intensive tasks.
Yessir! Working on it now!
Yes. Its expensive. In other news the Earth orbits the Sun. I wish I had enough $$$ that the costs of this CPU was inconsequential to me.