Testing Setup & Procedures
We will be testing the Core i7-3820 against the Core i7-2600K.  We tried to configure the systems as closely to each other as possible with the available parts that we had available to us.  The system configurations are as follows.

System 1
Intel Core i7-3820 Processor
Gigabyte X79-UD3 Motherboard
Sapphire Radeon HD6950 Video Card
16GB G.Skill RipjawsZ Memory (DDR3-1866)
Thermaltake 1200W Power Supply
750GB SATA II Drive
Cooler Master Cosmos II Case

System 2
Intel i7-2600K Processor
ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Motherboard
Sapphire Radeon HD6950 Video Card
8GB Kingston HyperX Genesis Memory (DDR3-1866)
Corsair TX650 650W Power Supply
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6GB/s Hard Drive
Thermaltake Armor A60 Case

For reference at stock speeds the i7-2600K runs at 3.4GHz and the i7-3820 runs at 3.6GHz.

We have organized our tests into different categories the tests and categories are as follows.

Overall System Tests
PCMark 7
PCMark Vantage
Performance Test PassMark
Geekbench
Sisoftware Sandra Overall Score

CPU Tests
AIDA64
- CPU Hash
- CPU PhotoWorxx
- CPU Queen
- CPU AES
Sisoftware Sandra
- Processor Arithmetic
- Processor Multimedia
Cinebench R11.5
Performance Test
- CPU Mark

Memory Tests
AIDA64
- Cache & Memory Benchmark
SiSoftware Sandra
- Memory Bandwidth
- Memory Latency
- Memory Cache Bandwidth

Video Tests
3DMark 11
3DMark Vantage
Heaven Demo 2.5
Stone Giant Demo

Gaming Tests
Battlefield 3
Alien vs. Predator
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Now let’s get into testing!