Gaming, plus a look at the HD Graphics
Jumping over to gaming now, we have results from all the chips using an admittedly high-end Radeon HD 6950 2GB card. Benchmarks are carried out at 1,280x720/800 low-quality and 1,680x1,050 medium/high quality for Call of Duty: Black Ops and StarCraft II, respectively.
Numbers are also added for the integrated graphics at the same setting, taking in the HD 3000, HD 1000 (Core i5 650), and 890GX from AMD.
Sandy Bridge's HD 3000 makes a reasonable fist of running Black Ops at the low-quality setting, and it's the fastest of the IGPs on test.
But it's fouled by the high-quality settings at 1,680x1,050. Repeating an old maxim: get a discrete card if you want to play games.
StarCraft II is interesting insofar as it's heavily CPU dependent. We're impressed to see the 2500K and 2600K produce the best average frame-rates in this 11-chip line-up, while the HD Graphics make a good show of rendering the game at this laptop-esque resolution.
Dial it up and, well, StarCraft II is still playable on Sandy Bridge's top-line graphics. Indeed, it's double the speed of HD 1000 graphics on the Core i5 650 chip.
For those that love a bit of 3DMark, Intel's HD 3000 is the fastest IGP yet.
