11 replies to this topic

[FMod]

As of a few days ago, Intel's Ivy Bridge CPU became available for purchase. Not officially, but legally. The premium is about $100 now, but you have to understand it's something you aren't supposed to be able to buy yet.
As of today, enough of these have been bought and tested to make a few conclusions. I'll just summarize what they are.

1) Yes, IB is faster than SB. It overclocks a little better (5.0 is fairly accessible) and works a little faster at same clock. Overall, it's about half the step SB is over Nehalem, or Nehalem. In some applications less, in some more.

2) Yes, IB does work on existing motherboards. However, it works very poorly on most of them. Common symptoms include no overclocking, no dual-channel memory, haphazard frequency jumps and core dropouts, rare freezes, generally low performance. These issues may or may not be fixed by BIOS updates. Predictably, Asus boards do good, and, even more predictably, Gigabytes barely manage to start. The rest are in between.

3) No, you should not buy a Z68 motherboard and an Ivy Bridge CPU today. Your mobo may be updated and get good performance, it may be updated and still have lackluster performance, and it may be left as is. How much are you willing to stake yours will be case #1? If not a lot, wait till new boards are out.

[FMod]

A little heads up.
TDP for Ivy Bridge 3770K has been officially increased to 95W.
This is only an official confirmation of what tests were saying: the savings in TDP are negligible (1-3W) if at all existent. Now Intel admits it's not just a problem with early samples, but an inherent one.

The only explanation for low TDP and high overclocking demonstrated in some early tests is that samples for them were cherry-picked out of hundreds. This is not the case with mass production CPU. Practical IB units have higher Vcore and approximately the same power consumption as their SB predecessors. In overclocking, IB units actually consume more power than SB and are prone to overheating and thermal throttling. The problems only come past 4.2-4.4 GHz.

Intel rolled out its 22nm node unusually fast, nowhere else did semiconductor manufacturers get such rapid progress; the price was doing vertical (3d or trigate) transistors, which consume more power than conventional ones or the same tech node and don't scale in clock rate as well.

If you were waiting out on buying a new PC to get IB rather than SB, perhaps you didn't need to wait, Intel kind of let everyone down. If you are not in a hurry, and are not going to seriously overclock, since official IB prices have been slightly decreased, it should cost the same as SB, so, if nothing else, at least you may get better resale value. If you have a SB now, banish all thought of "upgrading" to IB, and even Haswell probably won't be as good as hoped.

Things might improve, but not soon, else Intel wouldn't do something as drastic as increasing TDP rating all the way to 95W, they'd pick some middle ground.

Edited by FMod, 17 April 2012 - 11:44 PM.

[hector530]

so the 600 nvidia cards are out and now ivy bridge CPUs are gonna be out too. my PC is now officially outdated YAY!!!!

[aruless]

Good to know, still im gonna have to wait for an upgrade, my saves are been using for a small business so no pc new for me at least not soon xD

[Dan3345]

So unless I am reading it wrong, what you are saying is IB isn't worth the upgrade over SB?

Interesting.. I can understand AMD blowing it, but Intel is new to me.. But then again I am new to Intel...

[FMod]

With degraded overclocking accounted for (unlike the samples sent to early reviewers), IB is barely a couple percent faster.
3570K is currently $249 vs $219 for 2500K, so on a budget 2500K is still better value. Power only differs by a couple watts.

(And I said fin or "3D" transistors are a tradeoff and not likely to work as well as conventional ones at the same node, but this is actually below my expectations. Maybe it will improve. Or maybe other companies will use FD SOI sometime later instead.)

Interesting.. I can understand AMD blowing it, but Intel is new to me..

Don't you remember Pentium 4, RDRAM and BTX?

Edited by FMod, 29 April 2012 - 04:46 PM.

[Dan3345]

With degraded overclocking accounted for (unlike the samples sent to early reviewers), IB is barely a couple percent faster.
3570K is currently $249 vs $219 for 2500K, so on a budget 2500K is still better value. Power only differs by a couple watts.

(And I said fin or "3D" transistors are a tradeoff and not likely to work as well as conventional ones at the same node, but this is actually below my expectations. Maybe it will improve. Or maybe other companies will use FD SOI sometime later instead.)

Interesting.. I can understand AMD blowing it, but Intel is new to me..

Don't you remember Pentium 4, RDRAM and BTX?

Yeah but if I recall pentium 4 was still widely used in most casual desktop setups.

[hoofhearted4]

so, from the multiple reviews ive read and watched, this is the gist of it.

if your upgrading from an old old PC or building a new on from scratch (like me) go with IB. at stock it is roughly 5-10% faster. and even if it uses only a few watts less, it still uses less power.

the overclocking however isnt very good. it can get to light overclocks no problem. anything between 4.0-4.5 should be achieved no problem. anything over that, no matter your cooling, is going to result in high temps.

IB however has support for PCIe3.0. not a big deal atm, but could be in the future. it also has integrated graphics, which isnt as good as AMD's but is still very nice to have.

if you already have SB, no there is no need to upgrade. remember, IB is not a new CPU. it is simply a smaller version of SB with a few added features, but overall is not an entirely new CPU, hence there isnt a big jump between the two, and there was never meant to be. Intel called is their Tic Tock method. where Tic is getting the new CPU (which was SB) and Toc is getting the new size (which was IB)

i for one will be putting a 3570k in my new PC. with z77 chipset and probably a 7850, unless Nvidia comes out with something by then.

[uberness23]

Meh, I haven't been impressed with IB yet. Although having given up on AMD (Bulldozer, WTH???) for CPU's I suppose it's a step up. My current CPU is unlikely to be outmoded anytime soon and easily reached 5.2 Ghz with only a little fiddling around with vcore.

[FMod]

if your upgrading from an old old PC or building a new on from scratch (like me) go with IB. at stock it is roughly 5-10% faster. and even if it uses only a few watts less, it still uses less power.

Only 4% for 3570K and 5.7% for 3770K.
That comes for $30-$50 extra, which currently is not a great deal.

I'm actually warming up slightly to LGA2011, which doesn't have and probably won't have IB. But i7-3820 is about $50 cheaper than 3770K, and you get same or better overclocking, PCI-E 3.0, with a ton of lanes, 4 channel RAM, and the mobo is about the same $50 more. For a Crossfire/SLI game system, it's reasonable. Not quite a better deal, but reasonable.
Not that you need it anyway, 2500K is well enough for any game, as games don't even take advantage of IB.