Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
The Sandy Bridge architecture’s HD Graphics 3000 doesn’t support DirectX 11, so there’s no way to include Intel’s Core i7-2700K in these benchmarks.
However, we do get a good sense for how HD Graphics 2500 compares to 4000 (not well). The difference isn’t quite 2x; however, we wouldn’t expect very playable performance out of anything with the lower-end implementation.
Interesting also is that the Core i7 gets a slight performance boost in the graphics component of 3DMark—which typically wouldn’t be reflected by a 100 MHz disparity. More likely is that the i7’s 8 MB cache is showing a slight advantage over the i5’s 6 MB repository.