Introduction
The 2XXX Second Generation of the Intel Core Processor Family took off this past year with many early adopters pleasantly surprised by the abundance of speed, updated technologies, and better graphics integration. Here at TechwareLabs we had the pleasure of reviewing the i5-2500K and i7-2600K last year with future prospect of greater economical choices to come in Q1 2012. The Sandy Bridge-E i7-3800 Desktop series takes on many of the 2nd Gen i7-2XXX series features with a boost in base clock speed, cache, and thermal specification. Continuing the 32nm production process and the same 130-watt TDP of its two big brothers it will also require the new LGA2011 socket. The i7-3820 differences include increased PCI-Express lanes, quad channel memory support, and increased memory bandwidth. The major deficit of this model is its four processing cores rather than six (eight threads rather than 12 with hyper-threading) found in this pricier big brother models. This edition also does not include on-board graphics. The mulitplier is locked on the i7-3820 but you can still overclock the baseclock and adjust up to a maximum multiplier of 43 (maximum of four speed bins over stock). We speculate the decisions to reduce cores, limit speed bins, and drop the embedded Intel® HD Graphics were to keep the price point lower and focus on users that would be utilizing discrete graphics and more single-threaded applications. For a rundown of Sandy Bridge and the i5-2600K CPU, check out our earlier in depth review of the 2600K.
Here is an overview of an Intel based Dell PowerEdge R720 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxkjrQ4UbJk