Manufacturer: Intel Price: $ N/A US Author: Steve Date: 04/20/2012

[ Conclusion ]

Those hoping that Ivy Bridge performance would prove to be leaps and bounds ahead of Sandy Bridge will be sorely disappointed with today’s release. That said, if you were expecting anything more than a 10–15% performance increase you skipped over the fact that this is primarily a die shrink for Intel, as it marks the introduction of their 22nm process. When compared to the Core i7-2600K the new i7-3770K wasn’t a great deal faster for the most part. Many of our real-world application tests saw very little difference in performance, such as Excel 2010, WinRAR and Photoshop CS5. That said, there were instances where the Core i7-3770K was around 10% faster, such as Fritz Chess 13. Where we saw the biggest gains was in our encoding benchmarks, here the Core i7 3770K was between 10–17% faster than the i7-2600K. Gaming with a discrete graphics card such as the GeForce GTX 580 saw the Core i7-3770K provide slightly more performance than the i7-2600K. Where the Core i7-3770 did impress was in its power consumption, which was 11% less than the i7-2600K, and while that isn’t a huge figure it’s made more impressive by the fact that it was up to 17% faster. The new Intel HD 4000 graphics engine was up to 2.3x faster than the HD 3000 graphics of the Core i7-2600K, so that was a notable performance increase. That said, saying an Intel HD graphics solution is up to 2.3x faster isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds. By this we mean the new HD 4000 graphics was still almost 20% slower than the AMD A8-3850 in 3Dmark11 and roughly 40% slower on average in the games we tested. Therefore those wanting to avoid the need for a discrete graphics card are still best looked after by AMD, and the Radeon HD 6550D integrated solution will even let users play a few games using modest visual quality settings. The Intel HD 4000 graphics on the other hand is not fit for gaming, and while we did focus on medium quality settings rather than low, the results were still miserable when compared to the competition. Therefore while the Ivy Bridge graphics might be faster than Sandy Bridge’s, they are still not nearly fast enough. That said, these integrated GPU solutions are not only targeting gamers but are also aimed at professionals as well. For video editing, web or graphic design the Intel HD 4000 will suffice, so the solution is not entirely useless, it simply depends on your requirements. Still, the power of this latest solution is underwhelming, there is simply no denying that. For consumers the arrival of the Ivy Bridge architecture is only good news and for those already invested in the LGA1155 platform it is great news as it is possible take advantage of these new 22nm processors on existing LGA1155 motherboards. For newcomers the Ivy Bridge architecture brings about an updated platform that provides more performance, better efficiency and a few new features at a similar price point to that of Sandy Bridge. With that said, we look forward to discovering what the new Ivy Bridge Core i5 and Core i3 range has to offer.

<- Previous Page Table of Contents Introduction Test System Specs Memory Performance Application Performance Encoding Performance Discrete GPU Performance On-die GPU Performance Overclocking Performance Power Consumption >>> Conclusion <<<

Calle2003 Posts: 16 Joined: 2010-04-27

Posted on: 04/23/2012 09:40 PM What kind of cooling did you use to be able to run 1.520v on an Ivy Bridge? It would be interesting to see some temperature readings as well.

ProX	Posted on: 04/24/2012 11:22 AM Nice update but nothing majorly new.

Snoop

Posted on: 04/24/2012 11:52 PM I was just getting ready to upgrade from my core i5 750 system so this is prefect timing. Thanks for the review.

Produkt

Posted on: 04/28/2012 08:30 AM Would really like to see the temps and cooling method used to sustain a 1.520v on the Ivy Bridge architecture. With such a small die size to dissipate heat, I can only imagine TERRIBLE temperatures. Reports of 90+ degrees Celsius are streaming in from mere 1.4v overclocks. I would imagine due to the parabolic temperature to voltage ratio, the core must have gotten red-hot unless cooled with liquid hydrogen/nitrogen.

ServerStation668

Posted on: 05/17/2013 08:23 PM With its Intel processors the Z1 by Hp has impressive benchmarks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY5DNyEOBeU