Ivy Bridge is here but if you have a Sandy Bridge system the upgrade isn't worth it

[Pe-Killer]

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/201...3770k-review/9

Conclusion
Intel is in the enviable position of having the enthusiast CPU market all to itself right now. AMD’s competition is increasingly focused on the fusion of GPU and CPU, but this has come at the cost of raw CPU performance. For those who use a dedicated graphics card there’s only been one choice for months, and Ivy Bridge only underlines this.

Minor performance improvements across the board in comparison to the previous generation of Sandy Bridge processors, a drop in power consumption and a like-for-like price make Ivy Bridge, without doubt, a worthwhile replacement, albeit not an earth-shattering one. If you opted for a Sandy Bridge CPU and its P67 or Z68 platform in the last year, there’s little reason to regret your purchase (unless you play lots of Shogun 2) and as such, no real reason to upgrade, especially if you’ve overclocked your CPU.

However, for new-builds and for those who skipped the Sandy Bridge last year it’s a simple choice: the i7-3770K is far, far quicker than an Intel Core i7-920 or any other preceding quad-core chip. It's also an absolute doddle to overclock to 4.4GHz and beyond. A decent Z77 motherboard requires you to literally only adjust the Vcore and multiplier to achieve stable overclocks. So long as you’ve got a cooler to keep up, clock speeds of 4.8GHz on air are perfectly achievable.

However, as you’ll no doubt have spotted throughout our performance graphs, the £160 i5-3570K is never far behind, and overclocks just as well (and in our case, better) than the i7-3770K. Here we see a case of history repeating itself: while the i7-3770K is faster at stock, the i5-3750K is far better value, and unless you’re making extensive use of applications that can take advantage of Hyper-threading such as rendering or video encoding, the i5-3750K is the better choice.

It’s the same dilemma that i7-2600K/i5-2500K buyers faced, and frankly, neither is wrong. Both represent a small, but meaningful step forward for Intel, and unless you require the brute power of the much more expensive X79 platform, offer all the performance you could need.

[hereticangel]

people wanted 5.2ghz+ air chip, its not that chip, at ,4.8ghz you looking at 80c+ load

[HeftyCrab]

Is it just me or did the author swop the i5-3570k to i5-3750k during the article?

[Ampha]

More reviews can be found here (lots and lots of them)
Ivy Bridge Reviews

[Reaper84]

Im still rocking a C2Q Q9400 so I will be getting a 3570K as soon as possible.

Apparently the suppliers have chips, they just can't sell them until the 29th

[GreyBush]

Guesstimate on the price of a Z77 mobo and an i5-3750K? Same as sandybridge?

[TJ99]

So, pretty much as expected then, no massive revolution this time around. Not that I would have upgraded anyway if it was, my 2600K is still insanely fast at 4.4GHz.

[hereticangel]

Guesstimate on the price of a Z77 mobo and an i5-3750K? Same as sandybridge?

asrock extreme 5 z77 is R1600 at rebeltech, and the 3570k about 2.2k or so.

[Reaper84]

I think its the extreme 4 at Rebeltech. Its a very good motherboard but I went with the Gigabyte z77x-ud3h with the wifi add on

Still not 100% sure on Asrock just yet even though I hear they are reliable. Can never go wrong with Gigabyte

[Pe-Killer]

I think its the extreme 4 at Rebeltech. Its a very good motherboard but I went with the Gigabyte z77x-ud3h with the wifi add on

Still not 100% sure on Asrock just yet even though I hear they are reliable. Can never go wrong with Gigabyte

+1 Gigabyte Or Asus.

[Reaper84]

I really wanted an asus z77 but they are scarce here in SA. Wonder why?

[nelis]

If you a gamer rather upgrade your graphics card if you have sandy bridge. I can still play most games on full graphics and if I get a gtx 680 I will be able to run every game at full again

[Reaper84]

If you a gamer rather upgrade your graphics card if you have sandy bridge. I can still play most games on full graphics and if I get a gtx 680 I will be able to run every game at full again

+1 But if you coming from s775 like me then its a major upgrade. Just can't decide if I'm going 3770K or 3570K?

[Archer]

+1 But if you coming from s775 like me then its a major upgrade. Just can't decide if I'm going 3770K or 3570K?

Do you do lots of rendering, heavy photoshop, etc? Then you want the 3770k
Do you spend 90% of more of your time gaming? Then you want the 3570k

[RaptorSA]

I think someone would really need a specific reason to make use of all that processing power.
I cannot imagine why I'd need a better chip than my 2500K for gaming, browsing etc. on my Desktop at home, in fact, I could easily be accused of not using it to its full potential even though I'm permanently glued to it when I'm at home.

I think the 22Nm thing will definitely be cool for Notebooks though, then again, my older i7 720QM Notebook chip is also more than enough for running all my development apps etc. and not a day goes by that I haven't been impressed by this machine (2 years and counting now).
Could do with some better battery life though.

Back in the days there was a huge difference between say, a PII 300Mhz and the 500Mhz for instance (or 133Mhz vs. 233Mhz if you really want to go old school ).
But these days it just seems to make more sense to focus on stuff like I/O (SATA2 vs. SATA3, SSD, GPU etc.). It's easy to skip like two or three generations of CPU's now and still have a machine that's a screamer.