Intel's new top-end Sandy Bridge is quite some chip. Sadly it was quite some chip when it was the slightly slower-clocked Intel Core i7 2600K. Not a lot has changed apart from the price.

It comfortably hoses the best that AMD has to offer and in the grand scheme of things isn't even the best that Intel can chuck into a desktop motherboard.

Multi-threaded CPU performance

Video encoding performance

CPU gaming performance