Overall and FV
So we went into this knowing this would just be an improvement on what we had already seen with Sandy Bridge. I was actually surprised at the improvements we saw on the CPU side of things, mostly due to the improvements in Turbo Boost. On the GPU side of things we saw vast improvements over the previous generation Sandy Bridge processors. So much so that it’s hard to believe that this is only a “tock” in Intel’s Tick-Tock product cycle. The new GPUs have opened up a lot of new possibilities as far as both transcoding and pure gaming potential. Please don’t get me wrong, if you are looking for top gaming performance a dedicated GPU is still the way to go. But for onboard, the new Intel HD 4000 is very impressive!
There is no question that this is now the top dog for main stream but how does it compare to the recently introduced Sandy Bridge E CPUs? The six core i7-3860X is without a doubt the king, the release of Ivy Bridge doesn’t change this. But at a price of $1000, it’s still going to be a hard sell to anyone who doesn’t have a bottomless wallet. Where I was really interested in performance is the difference between the it-3770k and the SBE based i7-3820. At similar price points and both sporting quad cores this is an interesting debate. First, going with the mainstream oriented Z77 boards are going to be much cheaper than a X79 motherboard, so in the end it will be cheaper to go with the i7-3770. But it really depends on how you plan on using your computer. If you are planning on running more than one GPU or if you want the additional bandwidth X79 is still the way to go. But for a single GPU or onboard GPU setup there is no question you should run out and pick up an Ivy Bridge Based setup right now.
