Intel Unveils Sandy Bridge: Core i7 2600K, i5 2500K, i5 2400, i3 2100 CPUs

Starcraft II

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a military science fiction
real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment for
Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. A sequel to the award-winning 1998 video
game StarCraft, the game was released worldwide on July 27, 2010. It is
split into three installments: the base game with the subtitle Wings of
Liberty, and two upcoming expansion packs, Heart of the Swarm and
Legacy of the Void. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has had a successful
launch, selling three million copies worldwide in less than a month.

We tested Starcraft II at Ultra Settings on both the GPU and CPU at resolutions of 1024×760, 1680×1050, and 1920×1080.

Besides the obvious overclocked Core i7 2600K, it’s a Sandy Bridge sweep with the Core i3 2100 even getting in on the action! Keep in mind that gameplay was recorded live with FRAPS and can have a slight variance. Sandy Bridge once again shows a consistent improvement in frames per second over Lynnfield and AMD’s fastest Phenom processors, even at a resolution of 1920×1080.

Clearly though, overclocking Sandy Bridge for gaming performance is not a necessity; the 4.9GHz clock speed yields just a 4fps difference at best.