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OK, so if the rumors are true, we'll see the Sandy Bridge E review up bright & early on Monday morning.
Here are my predictions for the 6 core chips:

1. At default clocks it'll beat the 990x pretty uniformly but not by a particularly impressive amount outside of RAM and AVX enabled benchmarks.
2. At default clocks you will see some reduction in power consumption, mostly in idle power, compared to the Gulftowns.
3. These chips will overclock quite nicely with good cooling, and after the overclocking is done then you'll start to see some worthwhile performance gains over the existing 6 core Gulftowns and regular Sandy Bridges.
4. The first revisions of the chip won't support PCIe 3.0 (remember PCIe is on the processor itself and there is no northbridge). Since there's no PCIe 3.0 hardware to test on and since there are a crapton of PCIe 2.0 lanes, this will not be a huge issue.
5. The 3930k that should cost ~$600 will be a much more exciting chip than the 3960x since it is cheaper and has a smaller L3 cache that will make overclocking easier.
6. These things will likely have statistically insignificant performance differences from the regular Sandy Bridge chips at games *until* you go to 2 or 3 way video cards where the extra PCIe bandwidth will start to help.
7. The relative lack of hype around this platform is justified. While it definitely has superior performance to its predecessors, the strength of the consumer Sandy Bridge and the Bulldozer disaster have blunted the hype. The LGA 2011 socket will get more interesting in the future when Intel comes out with the X89 (or whatever the successor to X79) that adds in the extra features we wanted in the first revision, and when future revisions of SB-E and IB-E roll out.
8. This is the most out on the limb guess: Since the consumer version of Haswell is apparently sticking with DDR3, Intel will make a Haswell-E that will fit in socket 2011. The high-end chips won't bother with the integrated VRMs used to squeeze power savings out in notebooks, so socket 2011 will still be OK for Haswell-E.


Those are my $0.02. Anybody have any other thoughts?

There was a thrill?

With the 1155 based SB performance everyone is getting i kinda think chipzilla shot themselves in the foot,price gouging wise.SBe looking forward to checking out the benchmarks.
But i pray for a 6 core 1155 Kmodel Ivy bridge for around 7 months from now,That would rock:)(
What do i need 6 cores for???? Umm i heard more is better,overkill better then underkill etc.

SB-E is the workstation/server version which means it has more cores, L3 cache and more PCIe bandwidth. Neither of these are needed in the desktop/gaming arena. Just stick with the regular SBs or wait for Ivy Bridge to come out.


The hardcore epenis types will still get it because it fastest platform that they can get. They will also help Intel by playing "Beta-tester" for their next-generation workstation/server platforms.

As expected gaming performance remains same as sandy i7 series, more here

I like Sandy-E, because it recently caused a local idiot (thanks craigslist) to unload his gulftown for a low low price It should breathe some cheap extra staying power into my 2009 X58 system, since theres yet to be a compelling reason to upgrade. Same goes for current GPU, a launch day 5870: still surprised how much mileage it will probably get. (40nm dragging its heels)

I don't see the point of getting this for a desktop, but it will be the best server CPU out there. We need to buy a few hundred more machines for next year and I really hope we can wait long enough to grab these rather than the old Westmere-EP ones. It's essentially 20-25% more performance at the same price.

I think we need to wait if new stepping will included PCI-E 3.0 and have it tested with the upcoming 28nm GPUs which I hope will include PCI-E 3.0. Also I think that some X79 motherboard manufacturers will support PCI-E 3.0. I am almost certain that my rig will not be able to run Metro Last Night and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 fully maxed out if the aforementioned titles have higher priority on PC rather than consoles.

I find it quite amusing to read derogatory comments about new hardware from people who are using archaic hardware. While others seem to keep their fingers crossed that new hardware will not outperform theirs and cling on to some screen shots that are claimed to be legitimate benchmarks.

It will be faster, of course --but it's not just the cost increase of the CPU, but the mainboard as well. When you compare predicted pricing of SB-E to sale prices on an i5-2500k ($189 every so often, with a lifetime low of $149 from Microcenter) or an i7-2600k (I got mine at NCIX-US for their grand opening price of $269), and then compare the likely board prices with mid to upper-level Z68 chipset 1155 boards ($180-350 depending on features), it's only a great deal for someone who is doing rendering duty, video encoding on a near-daily basis, or who absolutely has to have the best Folding farm on the planet regardless of cost.

It's not just that there isn't anything an i5-2500K or i7-2600K can't run --it's that there's hardly anything they can't run well. That, and the first Ivy Bridge processors are likely to be Socket 1155, giving a quicker upgrade path to those who stick to the mid to upper-mid end of mainstream.

Finally, PCIe 3.0 is nice if it happens to come with the rig you get, but it's not going to be necessary for probably the next two years, at which point we'll have Haswell to think about. IB processors are supposed to be compatible even with non Gen-3 boards, making that a non-issue.

Well TR did an excellent review (as always) and now we know all about the notorious 3960x. I was most surprised to see how power efficient these chips are compared to Gulftown, that's a pretty nice improvement considering both chips are on the 32 nm process and that the 3960x has better overall performance to boot.

I hope that they'll also run a review of the 3930K when they get ahold of one. I think that chip has a lot of potential to be a "reasonably" priced chip with excellent performance and good overclocking. The next step will be to see what the real situation with PCIe 3.0 is. Intel is only officially stating that PCEi 2.0 is supported to be on the safe side, but if the upcoming graphics cards work with these chips at the higher signalling rates then that would be a nice bonus.

im actually just plain bored of watching intel kick amd ass every where it actually matters what i would like to see is amd actually do something about this, i was actually reading through the SB-E review jus to find how badly bulldozer architecture sucks compared to intels.

Interested in a 3930K system here to replace my X58. Issue is I need a mATX board capable of support six DIMMs like the X58 RAMPAGE II and III GENE had. No such board yet exists. Of course Asus hasn't refreshed the GENE line yet either.