eTeknix Tech Review Of 2011

Quarter 1 – eTeknix Tech Review of 2011

January : The Sandy Bridge launch. A revolution in the CPU market?

January was a huge month of 2011. Perhaps the greatest processor innovation to date hit the market in the form of Intel’s revised 32nm architecture known as Sandy Bridge. Bringing dual and quad core processors to the masses with the performance to take on the X58 giants like the 980X in nearly all games and CPU benchmarks, at least when it comes to core per core performance.  Sandy Bridge was also revolutionary in terms of bringing brilliant performance per watt figures to the high end processor market, marking the death bell of the X58 platform by offering the same level performance for a quarter of the performance with about 40% less power consumption. For those who can remember as far back as January the Sandy Bridge came out on the 3rd with pricing lower than it is today, the 2500K came in at $216 and the 2600K at $317. This is perhaps widely recognised as the turning point in the AMD vs Intel battle, the gap was turned from a crack into a Canyon. And as you all already know by now Bulldozer didn’t go very far towards closing this gap before Sandy Bridge-E further widened it. Intel also went a long way to bring simple overclocking to the masses with the 2500K and 2600K processors easily reaching 4.5-5.2GHz with just a few multiplier tweaks, the 2500K is still currently considered to be at the sweet spot of price to performance.

February: The B2 Revision Sandy Bridge Motherboard saga and the introduction of Thunderbolt to Apple computers

The Sandy Bridge launch was absolutely faultless, everything seemed too good to be true and inevitably it was. By the time February had arrived a rather large fault had been discovered with the Sandy Bridge platform but not the processors. The fault for those of you who do not remember was with the motherboards. The Sandy Bridge Cougar Point chipset natively provided four SATA II and two SATA II ports of which the SATA II ports degraded over time as part of the problem with the SATA controllers on the boards that were affected by the problem. This problem would cause users to lose performance on SATA II devices over time but replacement boards were offered to most consumers after Intel collaborated with board partners to solve the problem. Consequently it has now become the norm to market Sandy Bridge boards as the ‘B3 Revision’ which in essence means that SATA II motherboard issue has been fixed.

In addition to that Intel was also busy with Thunderbolt. Announcing its new interface which provided a huge 10Gb/s in bandwidth, more than SATA III, and initially Intel to decided that they would give the exclusive rights for Thunderbolt to Apple as they were targeting the media professionals market as the most likely to use this.

March: AMD and Nvidia fight it out with the dual GPU giants: The HD 6990 and GTX 590 get launched

It was inevitable that after Nvidia and AMD had both released their new GPU ranges of the HD 6000 and 500 series that a dual GPU would follow suit. We had already seen the ASUS Aries card using two HD 5870 chips alongside a similar mammoth in the form of the HD 5970 which AMD actually developed themselves. However, we never saw a dual GPU monster from Nvidia in the 400 series, there was much speculation about a GTX 490 but it never came. Therefore on Nvidia’s part the GTX 590 was long overdue. Yet, AMD still managed to get to market first with their HD 6990 on the 8th of March whilst Nvidia came a few weeks later on the 24th of March with the GTX 590. In terms of performance both cards are relatively similar, the HD 6990 takes the overall lead in terms of raw processing power but when tesselation is brought into the equation the GTX 590 takes the lead. Both cards were loud, power hungry and hot running monsters but if you were after the best video card on the planet then chances are one of these would of taken your fancy.