Sandy Bridge was really ahead of its time back in the day. While struggling in AAA games made after 2019, it had a fantastic run for at least 7 years.

You can squeeze quite a bit more performance out of these old CPUs by disabling Meltdown/Specter vulnerability patch. I believe Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPUs were hit the worst by the patch. Anyhow, got a Xeon E3-1245 (i7-2600 @ -100MHz) a while back for $7 and I must say it's a great little CPU for the price. Wish I'd an overclockable motherboard as it can be OC'd up to 3.8GHz, all cores, for a little more kick. Still, I wouldn't recommend buying Sandy/Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs in 2023. These old quads just don't cut it anymore and the X79/X99 motherboards are just far too expensive for what they are.

I got 100% achievements on Cyberpunk 2077 using my ol' i7-2600k (4.4GHz OC) + GTX 1070, and that was on the 1.2 patch.

One of the best CPU generations ever: -Low power consumption / cool running -Crazy Fast -Very good OC capability -Cheap Man back then PC gaming hardware was great and worth buying new

Funny how I didn't have the luck to get a Sandy which overclocks to 5GHz until this year, and it's even a 2500K. Even 5.2GHz is stable :)

Early March of 2011 was a special year with Sandy Bridge and with my shiny new 2600k. Still have it in its original configuration/Case and a Zotac GTX 680. (4.2ghz, 16 gigs of Corsair Vengeance 1600 mhz, And a Zalman 9900X air cooler) I'm impressed Nexus by the fancy motherboard and 2133 mhz ram you paired with it. Thanks for the review!

2700K one of my preferred CPUs i never had :) Glad you channel is growing, you deserve it. I got my 3770K in 2013 and kept it in my rig until late 2017 and then until 2021 in a family member's PC for usual stuff like browsing and office work. It is now delided with liquid metal and sitting in a box waiting for me to pull it out for some more fun OC sessions. Yes, back then CPU's were fun to overclock and you could really gain performance, not the measly 5% you get with today's hardware.

Good to see sandy bridge still goin' good! (i'm even using i7 2600k now)

I had a Sandy Bridge but it was just the Pentium G620. I later got an Ivy Bridge 3570K though and eventually I had a 2500K for a short time in a secondary system before giving it away.

Good video, I am absolutely amazed by the 2700K performance, whoever got one back in the day really got every $ value. It runs Cyberpunk at almost 100 fps... I would love to see some more extended gameplay with this cpu too.

I had a i7 2600k back in the day overclocked to 4.5ghz it lasted me soooo long ❤

I've been wanting to do some 2nd and 3rd gen overclocking but I need to get a Z77 MB. I have a 2500k but I also want to get a 3770K and use it to build a gaming rig for my bedroom. I have a 1080 FTW I want to keep as part of my permanent collection and an overclocked 3770K would be a good match for that. Good luck with Bulldozer. I've never used it but I think an FX 8350 / HD7950 build would be a neat thing to add to my collection. It would be alright for running emulation, although I think I would be undervolting the crap out of it if I was actually going to use it regularly.

I have this CPU in a backup computer that's in the closet collection dust. I built it a long time ago in 2012 with a water cooler, Asus P8P67 deluxe, 12gb memory, and I believe a GTX 560ti. I went overkill on the CPU with the plans of just upgrading the GPU over the years as needed. It started to show it's age when Battlefield 1 came out when I had to overclock it to 4.8GHZ to stop bottlenecking the GPU. It got handed down to my kid 3 years ago with a GTX 1060 when I built a Ryzen gaming rig and got put into storage last year when I built the kid a Ryzen gaming rig as well.

2500k from launch until I replaced it with the 9900k. 580gtx, 970gtx, and finally the 1070gtx all on the 2500k OC and had a blast through Skyrim and Fallout 4.

sandy bridge is a beautifully aging cpu architecture

Would you test the i7 6950x? It still holds up amazing

i still have an old beast i7 3930k, which was also sandy bridge :D Runs very well with the 1070, i just use it as standalone Vr rig in the basement.

Great value in this 2700k even today. Awesome benchmark 👌

holding my old one right now! debating using it for offloading some older plugins in a server rack >:3c

OMG! What a beast Sandy Bridge🤩💪🏻Few months ago I have tested the i7 3930k at 4.7GHz with quadchannel ram running at 2133mhz and an Rx 5700 xt: it was impressive!😳 In some instances beated my Ryzen 7 3700X!! Now that i've got an RTX 3090 might re do all the tests😉😎

my first desktop also had the 2700k i miss it like i miss my Audi a4 B5 1.8TQ

Those were the good old days. I bought the 2600k after the Cougar Point issue was resolved and I rolled with it for a year until I gave it to my daughter. Overclocked to 4.8GHz, first try, Prime95 stable. 1.345v. It put Nehalem to shame. I rolled the Overclock back to 4.3GHz because that was the sweet spot for voltage, cooling, and workloads. During the lockdowns I bought a broken system with a later released 2600k and a GTX 970, but I had to put effort into getting it to 4.6GHz. Once the 2700k came out, you weren't going to get a good overclock out of the 2600k.

Sandy was the best 💪😎 5ghz air cooled, soldered ihs, massive oc head room, really easy to run, very snappy.

i used a q6600 based system until i upgraded to an r5 3600 based system in 2019. i totally get it. i was considering a new system around the 6th gen intel stuff (seemed fitting to go from a q6600 to an i5 6600), but i just ended up slapping an ssd into that q6600 build and it felt like a new pc so i held off.

Great video! Could you add 3rd, 4th, 5th ... gen of i7-CPUs to the comparison?

Can you do a benchmark and game fps test with gtx 1650... with this cpu

The 2600k will often beat gen1 Ryzen when comparing overclocks. I sent my 1700x back it was so weak even with a 3.9ghz oc and 2900 memory. Even a well tuned and oc’d AMD FX beats gen1 Ryzen in some instances. AMD did provide competition in the form of super cheap CPU’s. I paid £65 new for a fx6300 where my i5 4670k was £165 for about 15 percent more performance with both CPU’s OC’d on ROG boards as hard as I could push them at the time. The gap would be a bit bigger now as I’m better at overclocking Haswell but even so Intel was not good value. The top motherboard was only £150 on AMD but over £200 for the Intel equivalent too. It took more knowledge and effort to get FX to work well but the rewards were there and more significant than any on Intel if you put the time in. FX6300 is my favourite cpu of all time and gave me my best liquid nitrogen results.

The fx series processors both the x100 & x300 series chips benefits from memory, northbridge & HT link speed so worth testing those processors with a 2.4 ghz ht link speed & northbridge link speed.

Look at 4 and 6000 series with avx

daymm not bad, especially with like a RX5700, 1080ti or something

To think smart people upgraded cpu's every generation since then, for gaming. Me: i7-870 since 2010 and going.

well. my local minecraft server with skyfactory 3 mod pack still runns on a overclockt 2600k ^^ soo yea. good chip

So basically for 4k gaming you could use a 2700k and get away with it. That’s mad.

5:23 .... I have a couple of those x299 processors and they really are not great with gaming. They're not much better than Zen+ at stock, and Zen 2 with a Good overclock. Their gaming performance is hindered by the Mesh Interconnect, while Sandy Bridge and most everything released afterward uses the Ring Bus. About a year and a half ago I bought a Core i9-7960x from China, which is a Silicon Lottery winner. Even after being delidded, and overclocked to 4.8GHz on all cores, it can't touch an untuned Ryzen 5950x.

Ok, I'll be the arse this time around: Is "Deus Ex: Mankind" supposed to be "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided" ?

Sandybridge was the best, only upgraded my i5 2500k last year, had it running for over a decade at 5ghz! The overclocking improvements were just nuts, 30%+ in some cases.

"I use an RTX3080 as a GPU bottleneck" I think you mean "... to remove a GPU bottleneck"

The Ivy bridge is about 10 percent faster at same clocks, it won’t overclock as much so not much quicker. Haswell is 10 percent quicker again but as the 4770k won’t often OC that well the Sandy and Ivy bridge are faster in some instances like older versions of cinebench. In real life the Haswell OC’d is about 15 to 20 percent quicker than the Sandy OC. I have a Kaby Lake which overclocks just like my 2600k did, best 4c 8t ever.

I downgraded from I7 3770K to 1600AF i should overclock it and buy 1440p monitor and performance will be higher ☠

The Sandy Bridge i7 2700K was hugely overrated puny 4-core chip with around 160 Watts of power consumption and quite melting temperatures. It's performance is many thanked due to hidden Shintel compilers in many game engines at the time and later on, games only utilizing 1-core and Shintels allowance of abnormal power consumption.