| Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge Processor |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Processors | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Monday, 23 April 2012 | |
|
Page 19 of 19
Intel Core i7-3770K ConclusionIvy Bridge is finally here, and if its performance improvements over Sandy Bridge are underwhelming, remember that Sandy Bridge set a very high bar. Without Sandy Bridge to compare it to, we'd be lauding Ivy Bridge performance and overclocking to the skies.
Ivy Bridge was perhaps one of Intel's worst-kept secrets, what with their bragging about their 22nm, "3D" transistors for the last few months. Unknown production delays led to Z77 Express based motherboards being available for weeks before the CPUs they were designed for, and that didn't help things either. Ivy Bridge represents a better value than Sandy Bridge, since it's both cheaper and faster. We can complain that the magnitude of these improvements may be rather small, but the truth is that Sandy Bridge CPUs represented such a huge advance over the previous generation Intel and current AMD processors that there's no way Ivy Bridge could have been that much better. Also, keep in mind that new mainstream CPUs simply aren't designed with desktop systems as a priority any more. Ivy Bridge's biggest new feature is its improved performance per watt. Intel says the Core i7-3770K processor will sell for $312...but that's Intel's price for a tray of 1,000 CPUs. Still, Intel's "1000 piece" price typically predicts retail prices pretty well, although you can expect some early price-gouging for the individual CPUs from the usual suspects, as we saw with AMD's Bulldozer CPUs and Intel's own Sandy Bridge Extreme when they were introduced. The real impact of the Ivy Bridge architecture will be felt in the mobile device and server market, but once the price settles down, this top-end Ivy Bridge processor will be a very good value, since it's both faster and cheaper than its Sandy Bridge forebear. The only weakness in this CPU compared to Sandy Bridge is its overclocking performance, which will hopefully improve...but right now you can probably get a little more performance from an overclocked Sandy Bridge CPU, and that's just enough to keep the Core i7-3770K from taking the gold. Pros:
|
|
Comments
Ivy Bridge does enable the mainboard's PCI-E 3.0 features, but I don't think that your card is 3.0 compliant. If there is a huge advantage to PCI-E 3.0 as opposed to 2.0 operation, that would make me want to change over.
Thanks for the review. It was a good read.
In any case right now PCI-E 3.0 bandwidth improvements have no discernible effect on graphics performance since no card is anywhere close to saturating the bandwidth of 16x or even 8x PCI-E 2.0.
Speaks volumes for the entry-level market, though, not much for the market the 3770K is in.
-Hank
I have an A8 APU and when paired with the 1GB XFX HD6670 Radeon card I have, it performs pretty good. It's a good overclocker and most of the available socket FM-1 mainboards have a ~lot~ of useable features on them. It represents excellent value for the low cost of ownership.
But, as you say, it is Apples and Oranges in the marketplace.
If you look at some of the other articles going around the net on this topic, you'd think IB is the second coming.
Hilbert Hagedoorn (Mr. GURU 3D, himself) says that the i7-3770K is an excellent overclocker, (guru3d.com/reviews) while you say otherwise.
Is there such a large difference between Engineering Samples, or is this the same-o, same-o from Intel, where there's a large gap in performance from one (supposedly) identical cpu to another?
It's fairly common knowledge that retail bought cpu's OC better than the engineering samples given out to review sites. Is this the case concerning the cpu that you tested, and that a retail version may actually OC much, much better than the one you have?
If so, then the reviewing of any free sample should never be done. Ever.
If any reviewer can't afford, or is too cheap, to buy a random retail component for reviewing, then the review is completely suspect, since it does NOT apply to what real people buy themselves off-the-shelf.
So yes, in answer to your question, there is a difference between engineering samples; in fact there's a difference between retail samples, as any overclocker knows. And as for "large difference", the 4.9GHz Hilbert reached was a mere 4.2% better than the 4.7GHz I reached, so your definition of "large" seems a little off to me.
No review sites normally buy retail samples of the products they review. Even if we did, waiting for a retail Ivy Bridge CPU would mean you'd read all these reviews weeks later than you would otherwise. And I'm not sure I could wait that long for your appreciation.
benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11003
I'm not going to bother visiting his site to find out, but I presume he might have cooled it differently or simply received a better sample.
Going to hate forever?
It looks possible that even if it brings better power usage, throttling might bring overall performance down if a manufacturer isn't attentive to their cooling system design.
So doubling the potential throughput from x16 2.0 to x16 3.0 won't make any difference because no current software is trying to pump that much information across PCI-E.
The real win for PCI-E 3.0 would be with non-video card devices, like PCI-E SSDs. Of course the trouble is that with current Ivy Bridge systems only the CPU has PCI-E 3.0 lines (the X77 Express chipset is still limited to PCI-E 2.0...and two SATA6 ports...and four USB 3.0 ports...because Intel is lazy), so the only slots with this connectivity are the one or two X16 slots a board will have, and these aren't the slots you'd put a non-graphics card in. Sigh.
Where this will make a real difference, as I notice in the review, is with laptop/ultrabook/portable devices. The lower power draw should make a real difference in battery life, allowing either smaller batteries (and smaller devices), longer life with the same size batteries, or any combination. This would be hard to test since you'd need two mobile devices with the only difference being the processor...and I only had a desktop CPU anyway.
Just today I have gotten three spams claiming they were new posts in Benchmark Reviews articles (including this one).
I enjoy reading the reviews here but if you guys can't do anything about the spam, I'll have to unsubscribe.
We immediately remove comments and block IPs, but unless you want to enter a long complex code then one spam message per week isn't the end of the world.
Last week I started getting a few more and today there were three when I got home for work. There's no way to block the sneaky buggers without blocking Benchmark Reviews.
If it goes back to one a week that would make me happy. If it increases again then I don't think I would stick around. We'll see how it goes. Maybe you guys can change the character test to four or five alphanumeric characters instead of three, or two short words. If it's spam bots that might help, if someone posts the spam manually then it wouldn't.
Good luck with it anyway.