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Intel Ivy Bridge i5-3570K & i7-3770K Review

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2012-04-24

Time seems to fly. Just over one year ago Intel introduced Sandy Bridge to the world. Packing a high performance CPU, with mega overclockability for the K skews, yet keeping power consumption and heat to a bare minimum. The best part was that Sandy Bridge was affordable and even a big threat to Intel's flagship, the socket 1366. World records were smashed at HWBot, as this little socket 1155 CPU overclocked to 5.8Ghz and beyond. The instructions per clock were way faster then anything we were accustomed too. End of last year, it was time to replace the aging socket 1366 by Sandy Bridge-E. The socket 2011 has big potential with it's quad channel RAM support and multi GPU excellence via 40 PCI-E lanes. But the overall clock speeds of the SB-E were disappointing. Most CPU's don't even go over 5500mhz on cold. Today we are gonna introduce the "Die" shrink of the little affordable Sandy Bridge CPU's : Codename Ivy Bridge

RAM Timing Check

So we already know the insane RAM dividers boost performance considerably. Now do timings matter if we opt to buy eg a 2400Mhz or a 2600mhz kit ? Let's take the fastest ram clock we could achieve with the G.Skill Flare on our i7 3770k ES CPU : 2600Mhz. To find out more about the timings we tested the following :

C9-12-10-27 2T (C9 results)
C10-12-10-30 2T (C10 results)
C11-12-11-30 2T (C11 results)
C11-13-13-30 2T (C12 results)

Rule of thumb normally is: the tighter the timings, the higher the price the vendor wants for that particular RAM kit. Let's see how important the timings are on Ivy Bridge.

Mmm, unexpected result, but 2600 C11-13-13-30 is just under a second slower in SuperPi 32M in comparison with C9-12-10-27. The difference between maybe a 150 euro kit and a 300 euro kit. Let's see some more results before drawing a conclusion.

The measured bandwith is ofcourse higher with the tighter timings, but massive gains they are not. Plus the AIDA64 test is purely synthetic. We have seen big gains before that reflected in zero extra performance in some applications. As expected the Latency figures dropped too when we tightned the timings.

If we compare with the RAM divider tests the Y-cruncher and CB11 2600C11-13-13 results are comparable with 2133C9-12-10.

The X264HD, even with the loose C11 timings keep 0.5 FPS distance from the 2133C9 test results. Timings can play sometimes a role, but it entirely depends on the application run. Though the extra cost of a tight timing RAM set are not worth it. Raw Mhz rule !

Comment from Teemto @ 2012/04/27

How about the issues with the heat spreader?
Maybe better to wait on buying one till Intel addresses this issue and switches back to the paste used in SB. If they plan to do that at all?
Other option would be to tear off the heat spreader but I'm not going to risk that on a 300€ CPU

Comment from leeghoofd @ 2012/04/27

Maybe Intel will correct it but I doub t it as for 24/7 there's no problem,
These CPU's are screamingly fast for daily usage and gaming. For benchers LN2 is the only way to go. Removing IHS for LN2 benching is too risky in my book...

Comment from Stefan Mileschin @ 2012/04/27

I am waiting to see some retail CPUs benched on air with the HSF removed

Comment from nigel @ 2012/05/01

except for the litle issue with the ihs and such these look just great.

I just hope to see more results with retail samples and modified ihs. Like lapping, no ihs, remounting ihs...

But nonetheless this is my next upgrade

Also nice write up once again

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