Well -- I missed the leap from Wolfdale/Yorkfield to Nehalem-I7.
So I can't make any comparison at all with the generation I missed.
But perhaps I chose to miss it because I was waiting for this improvement -- which some other poster insinuated to be "incremental." It may be. But I have to say -- Sandy Bridge "K" processors are "rich."
And -- see -- I wouldn't say it's just about the cores. Even for the fact that the core includes iGPU. Putting the memory controller on the processor -- that was one of the biggest factors with Nehalem. I'm guessing that the people at Intel probably were dropping in to these forums -- here and at other places -- just to think about "how to do it better."
So we have an entire menu of improvements. There's Sandy Bridge -- even for being meant for "mid-range" "mainstream" consumers (as opposed to "extreme" enthusiasts.) there's the Z68 chipset -- not to dliminish the P67/H67 that preceded it. But all this stuff adds up:
-- Several hundred Mhz in OC'ing headroom, at low voltages
-- This (new to me, anyway) "Turbo-Mode" OC-ing
-- bottlenecks opened wide with things like ISRT
-- the prospect of utilizing iGPU and dGPU together . . . and this LucidLogix-Virtu thing . . .
I just resolved my stupid mystery -- if I wasn't as old as I am, I'd try to hide it. I got my 2600K and Z68 system up and running . . . . got the ISRT to work with the OS installed. Kept going into BIOS and wondering if I'd been Rip Van Winkle asleep for 30 years, or why the old BIOS' of LGA 775 seemed like Model T's when compared to the Star-Trek Generations of Z68. And thinking "I can figure this out . . . I can figure this out. . . . "
Finally got all the peripheral voltages set -- for safety. I'd set the "Turbo Ratio" or multiplier -- even just to 40 -- didn't care about bumping up the bCLCK to 103+. Every time I'd save and re-boot, Windows CPU-Z and AI-Suite would tell me "3.4 Ghz." Or "3.5 Ghz with the bCLCK at 103 . . ."
Three days . . . . reading that stupid (as always, with ASUS) manual, looking at forum posts . . .
Then today, I finally opened the ASUS monitor and PRIME-95 simultaneously. Apparently, even the recent-last CPU-Z doesn't tell you what you need to know other than current VCORE. And . . . I get it . . . "Turbo" mode . . . . 4.4 Ghz.
And this is just . . . preliminary . . . for my conservative inclinations about OC'ing.
Almost takes the fun out of it.