Intel Core i5-2500K
Intel Core i5 is the obvious choice of
processor for anyone buying or building a new PC. It’s shockingly lazy to use
car analogies in a review, but in this case it seems appropriate, as Core i5 is
the Ford Mondeo or BMW 3 series of the PC world. It does pretty much anything
you need, costs slightly more than you want to pay and won’t embarrass you when
you’re out in public.
It’s tempting to extend the thought to say
AMD Phenom II is similar to a Vauxhall or a new Skoda that does a decent job on
a tight budget, but that leads us to the thought that Bulldozer is actually
nothing like a Bulldozer but is instead something oddball like a Hummer or a
Holden.
Intel
Core i5-2500K
That’s quite enough about cars, though.
Sandy Bridge is a development of the
original Lynnfield Core i5/i7 technology that as migrated to 32nm fabrication
technology with a heavy emphasis on power efficiency.
At idle this 3.3GHz quad-core processor has
a system power draw of 45W, which is only 5W more than the AMD Fusion. Under
full load in Cinebench the power draw rises to 100W, which is less than Fusion
and means that in any decent gaming PC the processor will draw considerably
less power than a single graphics card.
It also means that a decent 450W power
supply will be absolutely ample in your new PC and that’s quite a weird thought
in a world of 650W, 860W and 1000W PSUs.
In regular use the Core i5-2500K clock
speed can rise as high as 3.7GHz thanks to the Turbo Boost feature. That’s 400MHz
of dynamic overclocking free of charge and without any hassle whatsoever. If
you decide you need extra performance, then you can overclock this K series
processor.
A regular Core i5 is locked (apart from the
Turbo Boost) and is effectively a sealed unit, but with this Core i5-2500K the
sky is the limit for the overclocker who has patience and a decent multimeter.
We chose to take the easy option in the Gigabyte BIOS and left all the settings
on standard with the exception of the Turbo Boost limit, which we raised in a
couple of steps. It took less than ten minutes to get the clear idea that our
processor was rock solid at 4.4GHz and blue screened at 4.5GHz, and that’s on
standard voltage. Sandy Bridge responds to extra voltage, but it needs to be
used judiciously and we were happiest using stock settings. The lovely thing
about overclocking with Turbo Boost is that the speed drops back to standard
when the system isn’t under load, unlike the bad old days when your CPU would
hammer away at full speed just to run the Windows desktop.
With the CPU overclocked the power draw
rose to 130W under load, which is remarkably low by any standards. We tested
the various Sandy Bridge processors with a Noctua NH-C12P cooler with the fan
speed turned down whisper quiet. Our Radeon HD 6450 graphics card is passively
cooled and the noisiest part of the test PC was the cooling fan in the power
supply.
We do have a couple of points to make about
Core i5-2500K that appear to be common across the Sandy Bridge range. The first
is that memory compatibility can be patchy. You’ll have no trouble running two
modules of memory in dual-channel mode, but if you want to use four modules for
16GB of RAM you’ll need to double-check the memory is compatible with your
motherboard.
Our other thought is that the Intel
graphics are rather basic and merely do a passable job, but we have real issues
with the graphics drivers. In particular we found that connecting a display
with HDMI could give you horrible overscanning that moves the task bar off the
bottom of the screen and the left-most icons off the side of the desktop. You
can adjust the settings in the drivers, but it messes up the picture and
reduces the sharpness. The point here is that the Gigabyte Z68Ap-D3 only has an
HDMI connection, so we didn’t have the option of switching to DVI. Our final
complaint is that Intel graphics do not fully support DirectX 11 but only
comply with DX10.1/SM4.1.
The answer to those last two points is
simple enough, as you can simply plug in a graphics card and ignore the Intel
graphics. Do that and you will have a truly awesome gaming PC at a very fair
price.
|
Details
Price: $255
Manufacturer: Intel
Website: www.intel.com
Required spec: Socket LGA1155,
dual-channel DDR3
|
