Intel Core i7 2600K 

As fine as the Core i7-2600K was at photo and video processing, it had more trouble getting over the hump in terms of 3D gaming.

I was initially content with a 4.5ghz OC using a vcore of 1.296v, but curiosity got the best of me and I later found that I needed 1.356v for 4.6 stable and 1.376v for 4.7 stable.

With a good motherboard, its incredibly easy to overclock, and the voltage needed to hit 5ghz is fairly low (im at 4.96ghz @ 1.395v).

The Core i7-2600K also smoked all comers in our Photoshop CS5 test, blasting through all 12 filters in 2 minutes 57 seconds.

The average frame rates we saw in our 1,280-by-720 tests weren't much better with the Heaven Benchmark (13 frames per second), Lost Planet 2 (22.3 fps), or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (22.2 fps).

The same was true of our 1GB TrueCrypt 7.0 encryption test, with the Core i7-2600K taking the prize with a best-in-class speed of 195 MBps.

Even six-core Gulftown Core i7s look marginal.

For launch, Intel has cooked up dual- and quad-core derivatives.

It's yours for approximately £160 unboxed and effectively replaces both the old dual-core Core i5-655K and quad-core Core i5-760.

Intel takes a giant step forward with the Core i7-2600K, one of its inaugural Sandy Bridge CPUs, in terms of both value and media processing.

It's not legendary in the 3D department, but its media processing is superb, and in many ways it surpasses similarly priced predecessors from both Intel and AMD.

What Intel had told us about the Sandy Bridge chips' prowess plowing through media-centric chores was even more fully proven.

This is not to say that game lovers will want to chuck their discrete cards, especially if they're of the high-end persuasion.

The performance is amazing as well.

Intel says it delivers at least twice the performance compared with previous architectures encoding video in software, but a little Intel birdie tells us you can often expect much more than that.