CPUs

If you, say, bought a computer for a reasonable price and use it for bog-standard tasks like playing games, surfing the web and being generally — but not extravagantly — productive (maybe you do a little photo editing here and there, too), Intel’s new Sandy Bridge-E chips probably aren’t for you. For those who do workstation-level rendering or liquid nitrogen-cooled overclocking on a daily basis (and don’t have an issue with coughing up over a grand for a CPU alone), you’ll be thrilled to know that Intel has updated its high-end processor line.

On the back of numerous delays and ample hype, the first of AMD’s Bulldozer desktop processors has finally arrived and if this flagship eight-core chip is anything to go by, the series is . . . well, pretty decent. AMD’s focus with Bulldozer is obviously multithreading. On the most simplistic level, where Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs have offered substantial performance per core — with currently released chips topping out at the four-core (plus Hyper-Threading) Core i7-2600K — AMD has adopted a more aggressively broad strategy, claiming to fit eight x86 cores onto a consumer-level processor and offering it for the relatively low launch price of $285. Well, that’s the marketing talk, anyway.

AMD doesn’t seem to be closing the large overall performance gap between its processors and Intel's Core i chips, but its new Llano range is an interesting and promising new development. An advanced processing unit (APU), it combines GPU and CPU on one chip, and based on our testing of the A8-3850 desktop chip, the return in gaming performance at least is impressive.

Initial motherboard flaws aside — all of which should now be ironed out with B3 steppings of the effected chipsets — we’ve been pretty keen on Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors, with the Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K performance CPUs that we’ve seen so far receiving high praise. In particular, the former delivers unbeatable stock and overclocking performance at a price that’s easily within reach of most PC keenos.

Intel’s mid-range wonderchip, the Core i5-750, was easily our processor of choice for performance-minded (yet still budget-conscious) enthusiasts for most of 2010. It offers four physical cores, plenty of L3 cache and a pretty aggressive Turbo mode that pushes its low base clock speed of 2.66GHz up to a very respectable 3.2GHz in lightly-threaded tasks. All with low power consumption and the sort of overclocking headroom that means we’re yet to see a Core i5-750 that can’t be pushed to 4GHz with a semi-decent enthusiast motherboard.