What's the frequency, Kenneth?
And, just like the Sandy Bridge K chips, the 3770K is a doddle to overclock. Just by adjusting the Ratio Limits to 47 and using the stock 100MHz base clock, I got my sample to reach 4.7GHz and run stably at that speed on air cooling.
To compare the old and new, I lined up the i7-3770K against the Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K, which I happened to have to hand and which is only 100MHz slower than the i7-2700K, the new chip's closest match in the Sandy Bridge series.
PC Mark 7
Longer bars are better
X264 v4
Figures in frames per second
Longer bars are better
Cinebench R11.5
Longer bars are better
Apart from the move to a 22nm process, the other important IVY Bridge improvement is the new integrated GPU. There are two versions: the HD 4000, which is for high-end CPUs like the 3770K, and the less powerful 2500, which is aimed at the middle of the market. Its most important feature is - drum roll please - Direct X 11 support, a feature that was noticeable by its absence in the Sandy Bridge graphics core, the HD 3000.
3DMark Vantage
Longer bars are better
DirectX 10
Average frames per second
Just Cause 2 Dark Map benchmark at Ultra settings, 4x FSAA
Longer bars are better
With the die shrink comes better power consumption, the TDP (Thermal Design Power) of the i7-3770K falling to 77W, some 18W less than the i7-2700K. This is quite something when you realise that both four-core parts share the same 3.5GHz clock speed.
Next page: Board room shuffle
COMMENTS
Re: Price?
I have to say since the advent of dual cores I've struggled to justify subsequent CPU upgrades.
If I was brutally honest I could still be getting by fine with my old Opteron 180.
My main laptop uses just a CULV Intel 1.3Ghz dual core in it.
I find I go longer and longer between upgrades. I haven't paid more than £100 for a new CPU in years. The last one cost £60.
Unless you are looking for a cure for cancer, transcoding video all day or just love wasting your life with pointless synthetic benchmarks for bragging rights, most folks don't need to either.
Re: Price?
When compared to Sandy Bridge, yes. But whilst Intel are unquestionably occupying the top of the performance tower, cheaper apartments further down, are all being sold by AMD. How much of what most people do day to day is CPU bound and how much by disk or graphics? AMD can't compete with Intel in the arena of Who Has The Highest Numbers, but with their new combined GPU-CPUs, they are absolutely taking the crown in the Does What I Want For Significantly Less arena.
I think Intel know this. If AMD foundries could actually keep up with demand, they'd be the default for most of the of new tablet, netbook and laptop designs right now. Low power, built in Radeon graphics and good performance (just not elite performance like Intel's headline grabbers). And their parallisation is good which keeps them in the server market too.
Heat
Ivy Bridge does run cooler at stock settings, but I am surprised there was no mention of the heat when over-clocked.
Just upgraded.....
...from a i7 920 to a 3770K and, for my purposes, it a great upgrade. Benchmark rendering in 3dsmax gave me a 388% performance increase. If you're upgrading from Sandy Bridge may it may not be worth it but if you skipped that then I'd recommend.
One thing I wasn't expecting was the power usage. I used to have an "intelligent" powerstrip that would switch off all the peripherals when my machine went to sleep. Now when the machine is idle it doesn't draw enough power to trigger the other sockets.......
Re: MHz madness
I'm not an overclocking fanmyself, but there's no denying that a CPU running at 20% higher MHz can do 20% more calculations in a given time, which is after all the core purpose of a processor.
Whether or not you can actually make use of this depends what you do with your PC. For gaming the bottleneck is almost always the graphics card rather than the CPU, but for more 'workstation' type loads such as rendering or video encoding upping the multiplier will most definitely result in more stuff getting done in the same time.
Not sure what you're on about when you're talking about 'how fast you can feed the CPU', you seem to be suggesting there is some sort of motherboard/bus-related bottleneck which is just plain wrong.
