Just to make a little more clear to any others reading, Sandy Bridge-E's and Sandy Bridges can be on par, but I bet your statement took into account what you're paying for an SB-E and what it yields (which sometimes a negligible more, a negligible less, or just plain nothing worthy of notice), esp if you have to pay about $200 more (not sure) to get the similar performing SKU's to the SB's, IN GAMING (just for emphasis).
Well, performing better isn't always better in my opinion. Future-proofing makes sense, but if they perform similarly, why bother with an SB and not go with an IB for all those non-performance (except graphics, which in the context of this subject is negligible, except for the new and improved Quicksync)? Oh wait! I just remembered now about those new features by LucidLogix like that more efficient V-sync-like feature and the removal of the need to not have your discrete graphics there to utilize Quicksync. It would be awesome if they could load-balance some of the gfx workload onto the HD4000, well, at least for less CPU demanding titles since I heard an active HD4000 impedes the TurboBoost of the CPU portion, unless you have a better cooler and/or overclock, which disabled TurboBoost.
Back to what I said about better not always being better, some games are already gfx bottle-necked before the CPU can benefit much, and when we're talking about high-end, it could be overkill already, as in your system would be churning too many frames for your monitor to display (refresh rate dilemma). You'd want to turn on V-sync then and I, personally would want to underclock my GPU and CPU for titles that don't need that much power. Less electricity, less heat, and longer equipment life as I heard.
You sound like a real power user jfizzle4321, and I think SB-E suits you well. I bet you'd even be happier when game, and other apps, producers start employing those unutilized cores/threads of your SB-E, assuming you have a hexa in your system. But for a lot of us, SB/IB are good enough for us for now. You guys are probably gonna laugh at me, but I only have a Core i3-2120. I know... I'll try shooting higher next time if I rake in enough cash to splurge a bit.
On a side not, I don't know if you guys will hate me for saying just in case you guys hate AMD more or just love Intel more, but I hear AMD's gaining some momentum (improvements) with its Piledriver core. I really can't wait to see how Jackhammer (is it?) then Excavator would turn out. And with their APU's, if OpenCL and other GPGPU API's kick off A LOT more, we can see more of a challenge for Intel. I've been excited for APU's long before they came out, and though you may say it's been a let down, my excitement is still there since they're still going at it, Trinity seems well for more budget-oriented gamers at least on the mobile space. But I hope they do come up with the perfect marriage of good CPU and GPU performance and better Dual-graphics support (and hopefully it won't just end at dual). *sigh* how one could dream of a neck-and-neck competition by Intel and AMD, just like the gfx space, somewhat, since Nvidia is being competed with by AMD in terms of price rather than performance (at least generally gaming performance).
So yeah, we'll still have to wait (a fairly long time) and see. For now, I'm pretty okay with my humble Core i3. And thanks if anybody read this through and sorry if I sounded like a newb up there. Just some of my thoughts (which for the most part I guess, were derived from good old TH reviews, mostly if not wholly). :-D
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