With AMD not really turning up to this party, the comparison is with Intel's existing Sandy Bridge chips and most notably our old favourite, the Core i5 2500K.

We've ticked our usual benchmark boxes with Cinebench rendering, x264 HD video and gaming on the CPU side.

Overclocking is a key competence for the Core i5 3570K and we're pleased to note it's another near-5GHz chip.

We've also had a look at the performance of the integrated HD Graphics core, both in games and its hardware-accelerated QuickSync transcode engine.

It's a decent step forward compared to the previous core, but it's still not a great gaming solution.

Single threaded CPU performance

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks

Multi-threaded CPU performance

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks

CPU encoding performance

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks

Gaming performance

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks

Processor graphics performance

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks

Quicksync performance

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks

Overclocking performance

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks

Intel Core i5 3570K benchmarks