This article is awesome:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/...e_washes_ashore

All other processors cease to matter in the wake of Intel’s new high-performance CPU

When your only competition is yourself, what do you do when you have to introduce your latest and greatest CPU? Commit fratricide against your own chips? If you have the muscle and war chest of Intel, then yes.

At least, that’s what Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPU family does to the company’s existing lineup of processors—lines them up on a cliff and pushes them off, one by one.

The stellar Core i7-870? Off you go. Core i7-975 Extreme Edition? Who needs your luxury-priced ass, anyway? Core i7-950? We’ll see you in hell!

In essence, Intel’s Sandy Bridge has rendered all previous quad-core and dual-core processors obsolete in both performance and price. Yes, the top chips in Intel’s Sandy Bridge family are that fast. And they’re pretty damn cheap, too. The fastest Sandy Bridge chip, for example, will outrun the $1,000 Core i7-975 Extreme Edition, yet it costs just three bills.

----

The top-end Core i7-2600K smashes every other quad-core Intel chip by healthy margins. This is aided by the new microarchitecture, the ring bus, and other magical stuff, we suppose, but we see no reason to buy any other CPU for the money. Even the once-powerful Core i7-975 Extreme Edition is flatly punched in the nose by the 2600K. While the 975 is long gone, you can extrapolate that the 2600K will outgun the Core i7-950, i7-930, and the poorly priced i7-960. Against non-Intel chips, it’s no contest. AMD’s hexa-core Phenom II X6 1090T, which was already getting beaten up by existing Hyper-Threaded Core i7 chips, also takes a serious thrashing from the Core i7-2600K.