Across the board in our in game benchmarks we saw a nice improvement when using the i7-3770. Considering how close all of our Sandy Bridge results are, I would expect this to be related more to architectural changes like the increased turbo, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the Ivy Bridge CPUs performed similar.

Our passmark overall score shows the i7-3770k coming in slightly above the i7-2600. What that doesn’t show were little gems in the performance breakdown like the CPUs floating point performance. The i7-3770K out performed every other CPU we have tested in that test. Beyond that the CPUs performed very similarly short of in string sorting where the 2600 excelled.

Our PCMark 7 results are interesting. If you look at all of the results you will notice that the i7-3860X outperformed the i7-3770K in all of the benchmarks other than the PCMark result. After a little research, this has everything to do with video transcoding. All of the other results do not do any video transcoding and show the improvement based on the additional cores.

PCMark Vantage consistently puts the i7-3770K in behind the two Sandy Bridge E based CPUs but well above the original Sandy Bridge CPUs. It’s obvious that the extra PCIe Lanes are helpful here. But as a whole the i7-3770 is a fast CPU.