Today we are getting a preview of the Core i7-3820 that will be released likely in early February and will come with a much more reasonable price tag of $285 to fill out the LGA2011 socket.  The question that we must ask then is can the quad-core Core i7-3820 compete against the currently available quad-core Sandy Bridge parts that fit in the widely available LGA1155 socket?  We not only have to consider performance but also the features of each platform as well as the total cost.

Those debating between the Core i7-3820 and the Core i7-2700K then have to decide if the added memory support and additional PCIe bandwidth are worth the added cost. If you are a heavy multi-GPU user then that might be the case, otherwise we are kind of at a standstill. Motherboards based on the Z68 platform available now should be able to support Ivy Bridge in the coming months but in truth we don't expect the processor portion of that upgrade to be particularly noteworthy - only the GPU side of the processor will see significant jumps. On the other hand, Ivy Bridge-E may or may not even actually use the LGA2011 socket, as Intel hasn't confirmed, though all indicators show that it will.