System Builder Marathon, June 2012: $2000 Performance PC

Benchmark Results: SiSoftware Sandra

Our former build had 50% more cores than our current build, so we expect the current PC to take a big hit in Sandra.

On the other hand, few of our real-world tests can take full advantage of the fifth and sixth cores wielded by the Sandy Bridge-E architecture, so we’re expecting limited impact on the average performance used in our final analysis.

The overclocked Ivy Bridge-based processor in our current build can’t even touch the baseline CPU performance of our former build. But the memory controller is also on the CPU, so what effect will we see there?

The quad-channel memory controller in Sandy Bridge-E offers twice the peak performance of our current PC’s Ivy Bridge-based chip, yet better memory allows the current build to achieve 60% its bandwidth.