This evaluation will test our new ECS Golden Board Z77H2-A2X against our Gigabyte X58 and Z77 motherboards, as well as introduce Kingston’s Hyper-X SSDs into the mix while comparing 4GB of system RAM versus 8GB in gaming.  We are going to test possible performance gains by overclocking Kingston’s PC1866 DDR3 RAM versus stock speeds and against the slower-clocked PC1800 DDR3 that we have been using for the past 3 years.  We want to see if it is worth it for a gamer to upgrade his CPU platform.

Intel has released brand new Ivy Bridge CPU architecture on 22nm in late April of this year. We were able to briefly compare its performance in more than 20 games against our aging flagship 45nm Core i7-920 CPU at 4.2GHz by using an overclocked GTX 680 on both platforms. We benchmarked CPU graphics and we compared other performance benchmarks. Today we are going to build on our earlier evaluation to carry out a complete platform upgrade evaluation to compare Bloomfield’s Core i7 920 IPC directly against Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz.

We shall also attempt to reach higher clockspeeds with our Core i7-3770K and will compare further overclocked performance at 4.8GHz to test CPU scaling in gaming.  We are trying to help answer the question if an overclocked Core i7-920 is still “good enough” for gaming with the very fastest available video cards in the world – the GTX 680 and GTX 690.

Before we evaluated Intel’s Core i3-2105, our last major CPU evaluation introduced AMD’s new FX “Bulldozer” architecture as we focused on performance in 20 modern games. We compared AMD’s new 8-core flagship, the FX-8150, versus Intel’s overclocked Core i7-920 and the overclocked Phenom II 980 BE X4. We concluded that the FX-8150 required a lot of power and overclocking to beat the Phenom II and to approach the Core i7-920’s overclocked performance in gaming.

This time, we are taking a second and much more intensive look at Intel’s new enthusiast-level Ivy Bridge top LGA 1155 CPU, the quad-core, Core i7-3770K and we shall compare it in gaming against our Bloomfield quad-core, Core i7-920, overclocked as far as ours will go, to 4.2GHz.  Our overclock is considered a good overclock for Bloomfield, especially for the older stepping.

For our first look at Ivy Bridge in April, we received our Core i7-3770K only 5 days before Intel’s NDA ended and we had to scramble to get a suitable Series 7 motherboard.  We purchased a micro-ATX Z77 Gigabyte motherboard from Amazon.com that featured SLI and CrossFire at 8x+8x PCIe 3.0 specification.

Unfortunately, the motherboard did not allow the GTX 690 to seat itself in the PCIe slots very well over the SATA ports, and CrossFire and SLI was really hard to fit on such a small board.  Where relevant – and especially regarding Intel CPU graphics – we will compare this Gigabyte Z77 board against our new ECS Golden Series Z77 motherboard (below).

In the meantime, we received quite a bit of new hardware for evaluation.  Besides receiving the Z77H2-A2X ECS Golden Series motherboard from ECS, Kingston sent ABT two 240GB Hyper-X SSDs as well as 8GB PC1866 (below left) to compare with the PC1800 (below right) they sent us a couple of years ago.  This evaluation compares performance in games with the DDR3 at stock values and overclocked, as well as benching games with 4GB vs. 6GB vs. 8GB of system memory.

Kingston sent us two slightly different 240GB HyperX SSDs – one is designated “3K“(below left) for the number of program/erase cycles that the NAND inside the SSD is rated for, and it is less expensive than the “regular” HyperX SSD (below right) which is rated for 5K cycles.

There is almost no difference in performance between the two; perhaps “writes” are slightly slower due to the less expensive NAND used in the HyperX 3K series, but the actual differences in real world performance is negligible.  We also received a 32GB DataTraveler Elite 3.0 flash drive from Kingston which has proved invaluable in testing USB 2.0 vs. 3.0 speed transfers.

 

Core i7-3770K’s built-in HD 4000 Graphics

One important feature of Intel’s new Core i7 CPU is that Intel’s latest DX11 HD 4000 graphics is integrated directly into the CPU. This is a real convenience for Intel users as they no longer have to buy discrete graphics cards, to run the latest DX11 games or to run three displays for productivity. AMD’s new APUs also provide Integrated Graphics (IG), while the older Phenom II and current FX processors do not. That means that you must buy a discreet video card or spend more for a motherboard with IG just to run your PC at all with Phenom II and FX processors.

The Sandy Bridge Core i3-2105 is a dual-core processor with HT enabled and it uses DX10 Intel HD 3000 Graphics with twelve execution units (EUs). The new HD 4000 graphics is now DX11 and it has 16 EUs operating at 1150MHz in the Core i7-3770K.

Buying a discrete video card is never an issue for PC gamers as integrated graphics (IG) performance is never sufficient for them. However, we will again benchmark our Core i7-3770K’s integrated HD 4000 graphics on the Z77MX-D3H Gigabyte motherboard versus the HD 4000 graphics on the ECS Z77 motherboard with identical settings at 720P to see if there are any differences.

The Core Ivy Bridge i7 Architecture

The Core i7-3770K processor is offered in an 1155-land LGA package (H2). Here is an example of the Ivy Bridge desktop platform block diagram.

We are benching using the GTX 680 and the GTX 690 on both platforms to give you a comparison of our two CPUs’ scaling in games at 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 resolutions and at the maximum details that gamers play at.At time of writing, the GTX 680 (below) is the most powerful single-GPU stock card available and the GTX 690 (above) has almost the same performance as two of them in SLI while using less power.

The Core i7-3770K has four identical 3.5GHz Ivy Bridge cores, and is rated at a TDP of 77W. As with the other Ivy Bridge Core i7 CPUs, they have a large pool of shared L3 cache, along with four L2 cache pools (one for each core) and a pair of dedicated pools of L1 cache (again, one per core).

Here you can see it clocked to 4.8GHz

 

Probably the main advantage offered by Ivy Bridge’s Core i7-3770K is its incredible power savings features on the 22nm process. Ivy Bridge is a refinement of Sandy Bridge and a node shrink that should give us some performance improvement over last generation along with a lot of power savings and new features, including being able to drive 3 displays at once. A lot of the new significant improvements have been made to the HD graphics over last generation.

The Z77 Chipset and ECS Golden Series Z77H2-A2X

The Z77 chipset is the premium chipset for Ivy Bridge including Core i7 which supports both CPU multiplier and IGP overclocking (for unlocked Intel CPUs), Quick Sync, and SATA 6.0Gbps as well as PCIe 3.0. It also supports Intel Virtu Technology, which uses the IG for less demanding tasks and the discrete GPU for more intensive applications, saving energy. With this chipset, Intel has further refined their Smart Response (SSD caching).

The ECS Golden Series Z77H2-A2X is ECS premium enthusiast motherboard that includes their “non-stop” technology and premium 99-hour replacement service.  It is currently priced at $219.99 at Newegg which is average for a quality enthusiast board.

ECS Non-stop Technology

All ECS Black Series Motherboards are Nonstop certified, including the Z77H2-A2X and Z77H2-A2X deluxe.  ECS assures us that future Black Series Motherboards will also adopt ECS Nonstop Technology.  Nonstop technology comprises four interlocking tests and enhancements that combine together to protect PCs and defeat many of the most common causes of hardware problems and system instability.

Every ECS Nonstop certified motherboard runs a course of tests that checks and stresses critical components to ensure that they are up to ECS standards through their non-stop testing cycle over 3 days and under extreme environmental conditions. ECS Nonstop boards also include 100 percent solid Apache Long-life capacitors, to protect users from capacitor leakage and failure problems.

ECS Nonstop technology also uses comprehensive electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. The 100 percent ESD protection on Nonstop motherboards is achieved with special circuitry that protects expensive and delicate chips from static build up that can damage or destroy them.  So this motherboard is ECS’s premium board and it is also ‘gold’ in every way.

Warranty & Replacement Service

The 99-Hour Replacement Service gives ECS customers in the USA (48 contiguous states) a fast and trouble-free service to replace ECS products if any issues should come up.  Simply register the ECS motherboard or VGA card bought after Dec. 31, 2011 on ECS’ website, and if a replacement is needed, ECS will process your return and ship out a replacement within 24 hours after receiving it via 3 Day shipping – guaranteeing that ECS customers will receive their replacement within 99 hours.

In addition to the first class replacement service, ECS customers by registering their products on the ECS website will receive the latest product/service updates & announcements and be automatically entered in drawing for random prizes.

Register your ECS motherboard or VGA card at: http://www.ecsusa.com/ECSWebSite/Member/LoginPage.aspx

 

Specifications

Here are the ECS Z77H2-A2X specifications from the ECS web site:

As one can see, the ECS Golden Series Z77 motherboard is full-featured.  Head over to the next page and we’ll find more out about the new Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K as we unbox our ECS Golden Series motherboard.

The ECS Z77H2-AX2 Golden board

Unboxing and Installation

Everything about the ECS motherboard is golden including the service.  It comes (naturally) in a shiny gold box and gold is emphasied everywhere.  If you are an enthusiast who likes gold and black, then this is the motherboard for you!

The box opens out two full-sized flaps, one on the top and one on the bottom.These advertise the ECS motherboard’s features.

And here also we see gaming performance stressed.        Upon opening the box, we see everything is packed securely and that there are a lot of accessories as befits a flagship motherboard.  Here is everything out of the box.

We see lots of gold.  It accents everything.  And it also looks very nice even though it is perhaps a bit flashy or even ostentatious.

More gold, from another angle.  The are slots for 4 DIMMS of DDR3 up to 32GB total.  This motherboard supports the stock 1600MHz setting as well as overclocking the RAM to PC2800 speeds.  Besides two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots which work at 8x+8x bandwith each with dual video cards, there are two PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots.

Below the DIMMs are reset and power switches which are ideal for benching and testing.  SATA (Serial ATA) ports are nicely positioned along the edge of the PCB.  The Z77 chipset provides two 3.0Gb/s Serial ATA 2.0 two SATA 3.0 6.0Gb/s which can be set up for RAID 0/1/5/10 configurations.  There are two additional SATA 3.0 ports provided by an ASMEDIA 1061 controller.

The motherboard is laid out reasonably well and the only thing that we miss is the possibility of a third PCIe slot for CrossFire-X3 or Tri-SLI which you can have with the ECS Z77H2-AX motherboard.  However, we do not like the positioning of the CMOS reset switch at all.  You can see the red jumper in the image (below, between the PCIe slots) which will be covered up by any full-sized video card.  Ideally, ECS should move the reset button to the I/O panel.

Tip: If you do serious overclocking, overclock using the CPU graphics only or you will find yourself removing your video card to reset the CMOS.

The ECS golden board also sports Wireless BlueTooth and Wireless LAN dongles.  Included are DVI, D-SUB and HDMI for video as well as audio ports.  There are 4 USB 2.0 and 4 USB 3.0 ports as well as one eSATA 3Gb/s port.  The audio codec and the Gigabyte LAN are both Realtek.

The ECS Z77H2-A2X is a very attractive motherboard.  Let’s install our CPU and RAM and then install our ECS motherboard into our Thermaltake tower Overseer RX-I.  Originally we installed it into our Cooler Master Elit 430 mid-tower, but we wanted more room for our Noctua NH-DH14 and the highest overclock possible from our i7-3770K.

Installation

We are going to give a detailed installation of the ECS motherboard into our Thermaltake Overseer RX-I in the review coming up this week.  Needless to say, it was a totally painless installation with the Noctual NH-DH-14 and then with Thermaltake’s Water2.0 Pro CPU watercooler.  The Thermaltake Water2.0 Performer and Pro will both be featured in an upcoming “Air vs. Water” shootout with the NH-DH14.  As much as we love the amazing Noctua NH-DH14, we like the uncluttered look of the watercooling setup.

Here is the motherboard inside the case and ready for installation.

The CPU and RAM are installed and power cables are plugged in.

As you can see, gold is highlighted against the black and it is pleasing aestetically.

Now we are going to install our massive Noctua NH-DH14 which allowed us to easily reach 4.8GHz with our Core i7-3770K while core temperatures generally remained below 80C under maximum load.

 

Air Cooling

The only issue with our massive Noctua aircooler is that it covers up a lot of the motherboard and you must remove the outside fan to reach the DIMMs.

 

Water Cooling

We installed our Thermaltake Water 2.0 Pro and were able to match the same 4.8GHz overclock with our Noctua cooler.  The difference is that watercooling is less “cluttered” looking.

We have everything set up.  Let’s turn our PC on and head for the BIOS.

 

 

BIOS

Setting up and configuring the BIOS is easy although it is not necessarily intuitive.

We picked English.

After you pick your language you have a choice of setting everything to default, entering the Boot or Advanced menus.

Here is the Advanced Menu and we have highlighted the SATA configuration.

Of course, we picked ACHI mode.There aren’t a lot of options for the Chipset.

M.I.B.X is where the end user will do most of the overclocking.  We changed the CPU ratio from Auto (35) to 42 for 4.2GHz and to 48 for 4.8GHz.

 

We had to add .13V to stabilize our overclock at 4.8GHz with 4GB (2x2GB) of system RAM.  Using 8GB and twice the DIMMs (4x2GB), we had to add even more voltage to stabilize our overclock at 4.8GHz.Notice what happens when we disable Turbo Boost.    All of our options for overclocking disappear and when we boot up, we will be stuck at 3.5GHz without any Turbo at all.There are three major settings for memory configuration, Automatic, and two XMP profiles.

Automatic is the lowest memory settings, or 1200MHz, but there are many options if you choose Manual.

With manual mode, you have quite a bit of control over the memory timings.

XMP Profile 1 corresponds to 1867MHz; Profile 2 is 1600MHz.

CPU-Z confirms that Profile 1 is accurate.

It’s time to exit and save.

Finally we have the exit screen with save and exit. Pressing “F4” is the same as ‘Save and Exit’ while pressing “F3” resets to default. And we have pressed both buttons by mistake because of their close proximity to each other.

The BIOS is a significant improvement over older ECS motherboards, but it ultimately fell a bit short when it came to some important options and we will continue to quest for 5.0GHz with our Core i7-3770K.  We also found the voltage measurements were sometimes not accurate compared to the reporting and did not necessarily correspond to what the BIOS reported.  The end user should monitor actual voltage if possible.

We were able to match the 4.8GHz overclock of our Gigabyte Z77 mTX board, but no higher – not even though there appeared to be no thermal reason for for being limited.

eBILs and automatic driver updates

We have never been happy with this feature as it rarely has worked for us.  You are supposed to be able to automatically update your BIOS securely and safetly over the Internet.  It promises much.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver although you always have a less convenient option to make a bootable flash drive to flash your BIOS.

As to the driver updates, if you click on it, you get taken to ECS’ web site where you can manually download the drivers.  We would hope that they improve this section of their site and support to make it more automatic. Let’s look next at overclocking Ivy on the ECS Golden Series motherboard.

Overclocking

Core i7-3770″K” CPUs are multiplier unlocked and can easily be overclocked to well in excess of 4GHz. On the other hand, the Core i3 CPUs are locked and cannot be overclocked in the traditional manner. Only the base clock may be overclocked which overclocks the entire system. Overclocks of 3-5+% with stability are reported and there can be a small performance boost. The Core i7-3770K also has an unlocked base clock although we did not attempt to adjust it.

We found that we would have liked more options in the ECS BIOS to turn off Turbo and perhaps have better fine-tuning options.  However, we were able to match the 4.8GHz overclock of the Gigabyte mATX Z77 motherboard.  We were unable to get 4.9GHz no matter how much reasonable voltage we applied.  We could boot into Windows but the system was unstable.  Evidently, the issues are not thermal-related as temperatures remained around or below 80C under load.

Issues with 8GB (2x4GB) of System RAM and Overclocking

When we upgraded our Ivy Bridge platform from 4GB to 8GB system RAM (2x2GB to 4x2GB) for the last round of benching games and for all of the other tests, we noticed that it took significantly higher voltage to stabilize the CPU overclock and the system.  One RAM upgrade solution from 4GB to 8GB would be to contnue to use only 2 DIMMs but upgrade by using higher capacity RAM (2x4GB).

The Ivy Bridge Overclock versus Bloomfield’s

The highest overclock we could manage with our Core i7-920 was 4.2GHz and it was accomplished stably with our Thermaltake Frio OC CPU cooler.   To achieve the same 4.2GHz with Core i7-3770K we only needed .03V more added to stabilize our system.  To reach 4.8GHz required .13V and we needed our Noctua NH-DH14.  If the reader is interested, they can check out the Noctua NH-DH14 evaluation to see how we reached our maximum overclock with Core i7-3770K or the Frio OC evaluation to check out the i7-920 overclock.

Here is Core i7-3770K at 4.8GHz using Noctua’s NH-DH14 to remain below 80C under full load.

Although Ivy’s temperatures were good – below 80C under maximum load – we simply could not reach any higher no matter how much reasonable voltage we added.  In all of the tests between Bloomfield and Ivy Bridge, our CPUs are clocked to 4.2GHz.  Ivy is clocked higher when we are trying to demonstrate the effects of CPU scaling on performance and these further overclocks are identified on all of our charts.

 

Kingston RAM upgrade: DDR3 PC1800 to PC1866 and 4GB to 8GB

Kingston sent us DDR3 PC1866 to replace the 3 PC1800 that they sent us three years ago.  Evidently memory has got much faster and we want to demonstrate what performance increase there is in gaming.  For the Bloomfield platform, we first tested with 6GB PC1800 at 1200MHz and then compared gaming benches with PC1866 at 1333MHz.  For Ivy Bridge, we compared 4 and 8GB PC1866 at 1333MHz and 1867MHz.  Of course, Bloomfield use Tri-Channel configuration and Ivy Bridge uses Dual-Channel.We will increase our Core i7-920’s memory speeds from 1200MHz to 2000MHz and compare it to increasing Core i7-3770K’s RAM speeds from 1333MHz to 1867MHz.

4GB versus 8GB system RAM in Gaming

Since Kingston was very generous in answering our request to test their HyperX PC1866, we are now able to finally settle if there is any performance difference between 4GB and 8GB in gaming.  As you can see there is no performance differences playing with 4GB or 8GB of system RAM and we can be sure that there is no difference between 6GB and 12GB in Tri-Channel.  Of course, there is every other reason to upgrade your PC from 4GB to 8GB, but gaming is not one of them.

Effect of RAM overclocking on gaming performance

Now we are going to compare again using our entire game suite using Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz and Core i7-3770K at 4.8GHz with a GTX 690 – the only differences being the speeds of the 4GB of DDR3.

As you can see, there is a definite performance increase just from clocking the system memory higher which appears to be dependent on the individual game engine.  Please review the results again in this evaluation’s Gaming Performance as part of a full chart.

SSDs and Performance

We have performed many SSD versus HDD evaluations in the past and SSD is without question the single upgrade that will make your system faster and noticeably more responsive.  Although there is no difference in gaming performance between games installed on a SSD and the same games installed on a HDD, loading games, saves, and levels will be much faster.

The only issues for most gamers is the cost of storage of a SSD versus a HDD.  Only recently have the costs of storage dropped as prices have fallen close to $1 per Gigabyte for smaller capacity drives.   Most gamers would want at least 240GB of storage.

We are using two 240 GB Kingston HyperX SSDs that have essentially identical performance – the only difference is that the HyperX “3K” SSD uses less expensive NAND and the writes may be slightly slower than the HyperX (5K) drive.  You will only see these differences in SSD synthetic benches.  We have installed Windows 7 using Bloomfield on the HyperX 3K SSD and an image of the same drive for Ivy Bridge on the regular HyperX SSD.

Since we have 240GBs of storage available to us and our game library is much larger, we have installed 17 games of the newest games on SSD and we duplicate the installation on a 500GB Seagate HDD with the addition of the rest of our games.  All testing for this evaluation was performed on SSDs except for the gaming benchmarks or as noted.  The reader should note that the synthetic benchmark scores are significantly higher when testing using a SSD over a HDD.

In a follow-up evaluation, we will compare not only these two premium SSDs, but also a Vnow 200+ Kingston consumer SSD against our HDDs.  In the meantime, there are SSD performance benchmarks in the Summary and More Tests sections that will demonstrate the advantages of using PCIe 3.0’s higher bandwidth over Bloomfield’s older platform using USB 2.0

Let’s head over to our test configuration.

 

Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7-3770K (reference 3.5GHz, HyperThreading and Turbo boost is on to 3.7GHz; also overclocked to 4.2GHz and 4.8GHz; DX11 CPU graphics), supplied by Intel.
• Intel Core i7-920 (reference 2.66GHz, overclocked to 4.2GHz using the 21x multiplier; Turbo boost and HT are on)
• ECS Z77H2-A2X motherboard (Intel z77 chipset, shipping BIOS, USB/PCIe 3.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x)
• Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-DH3 Series 7 mATX motherboard (shipping BIOS, USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0 specification, CrossFire/SLI 8x+8x)
• Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P x58 motherboard (latest BIOS, USB 2.0, PCIe 2.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 16x+16x).
• 6 GB Kingston DDR3 PC 1800 Kingston RAM (3×2 GB, dual- and tri-channel at 1333 and 1200MHz; 2×2 GB supplied by Kingston)
• 8 GB Kingston DDR3 PC 1866 Kingston RAM (2×2, 3×2 and 4×2 GB, dual- and tri-channel at 1600, 1833 and 2000MHz; supplied by Kingston)
• GeForce GTX 680, 2 GB (reference clocks), supplied by Nvidia
• GeForce GTX 690,  GB (reference clocks), supplied by Nvidia
• Two identical 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard drives
• Kingston HyperX SSD 3K 240 GB, supplied by Kingston used for Bloomfield platform
• Kingston HyperX SSD 240 GB, supplied by Kingston used for Ivy Bridge platform
• Thermaltake ToughPower 775 W power supply unit supplied by Thermaltake
• Thermaltake Overseer RX-I supplied by Thermaltake
• Thermaltake Frio OCK CPU cooler for Core i7-920 supplied by Thermaltake for i7-920’s 4.2GHz overclock
• Noctua NH-DH14 CPU cooler, supplied by Noctua for i7-3770K’s 4.2/4.8GHz overclock
• Philips DVD SATA writer/Sony DVD SATA writer
• HP LP3065 2560×1600 thirty inch LCD
• ASUS VG278 1920×1080 120Hz 3D Vision 2 ready 27″ display supplied by ASUS/Nvidia

Test Configuration – Software

• GeForce WHQL 301.42 drivers used for the GTX 5680; latest Intel drivers for Graphics and Chipset from Intel website; latest drivers for HD 4000 and shipping drivers for Series 7 motherboards.
• Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates
• Latest DirectX
• All games are patched to their latest versions.
• VSync is off in the control panel.
• Varying AA enabled as noted in games; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied if possible; 16xAF forced in control panel for Crysis.
• All results show average rates as noted.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 7 64, all DX9 titles were run under DX9 render paths, DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths and DX11 titles under DX11 render paths.

Note

• 4GB of Kingston HyperX PC1866 used for benching all games on the 500GB HDDs, except as noted when 8GB was used.  All other tests with both PCs were run with 8GB of DDR3 from a 240GB Kingston HyperX SSD

The benchmarks

The Game benchmarks

• Serious Sam 3, BFE
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Crysis
• World in Conflict
• Far Cry 2
• Just Cause 2
• Resident Evil 5
• Alien vs. Predator
• Battleforge
• STALKER, Call of Pripyat
• F1 2010
• Metro 2033
• Lost Planet 2
• H.A.W.X. 2
• Civilization 5
• Total War: Shogun II
• Crysis 2
• Dirt 3
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Batman: Arkham City
• Max Payne 3

Other Tests

• Super Pi
• Fritz Chess Bench
• Custom PC Benchmark
• Cinebench
• x264 HD
• Crystal Disk Mark
• AS SSD
• ATTO
• Folder copy
• HD Tach
• HD Tune

Synthetic Benching Suites

• SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP4c
• PC Mark Vantage
• PC Mark 7

Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks

• Heaven 3.0
• Vantage
• 3DMark11

We have got an interesting project going. First we look at synthetic and real world benches before we head for gaming results.

Synthetic Benching Suites

 

 

SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP4C

For gaming we used our Seagate 7002.12 series hard disk drives because they have 500GB of storage.  We tested 17 games which are imaged on the SSD and also on the HDD and we could find no real difference in frame rates for benchmark testing performance.  We also tested Ivy Bridge with 4GB of RAM vs 8GB and the results are charted in the gaming section and in the summary charts section.

For all of our testing other than gaming, we used our two 240GB Kingston Hyper-X SSDs.  They are not absolutely identical and the i7-920 is running on the SSD that is theoretically slightly slower in “writes” only, the Hyper-X 3K edition.  You will see only slight differences between HyperX drives in the SSD tests that can compare performance against each other directly and we will explore this further in our upcoming SSD evaluation.

First we run the complete Sandra benchmark suite with X58 and Core i7-920.  Our charts comparing the individual benchmarks are in the performance summary as well as here.

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Now lets look at Core i7-920 processor arithmetic

Now it’s 3770K/Bloomfield’s turn at the same settings:

 And now lets look at processor arithmetic for Ivy.

Here are some of the Sandra highlights comparing Bloomfield to Ivy:

In every case, the new architecture shines over the old one.  Tri-channel memory and the extra bandwidth Ivy Bridge has over Bloomfield’s platform is compensated for and surpassed by the Ivy Bridge architecture.

 

PC Mark Vantage

 

PC Mark Vantage was developed primarily for Vista and it has been superseded by PC Mark 7.  Instead of giving you the detailed results, we are just giving the overall results since PC Mark 7 has updated most of the same tests for Windows 7.  We noted a really large improvement by upgrading from 4GB of system RAM and a 500GB HDD to 8GB of RAM and a 240GB SSD on our Ivy Bridge system, and we also saw a significant improvement on the Bloomfield platform just from moving our OS and applications from HDD to SSD.

An upgrade of an SSD from a HDD is the single upgrade that most users will feel as the most time saving and performance increase of their daily PC experience and the higher bandwidth of USB 3.0 over 2.0 is noticeable and appreciated.  Kingston’s HyperX SSDs are some of the fastest enthusiast SSDs available.

Here are the results of Core i7-920 with a stock GTX 680.  All comparitive tests were run with both CPUs at 4.2GHz.  Of course, we are running 6GB of DDR3 with Bloomfield in Tri-Channel and 8GB of DDR3 in Dual-Channel with Ivy Bridge.

Here are the 3770K’s results.

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There is a huge difference between the scores with Core i7-3770K winning in every metric over Core i7-920 although settings are identical and both processors and the system memory are overclocked similarly.  Even though we are running 6GB of Tri-Channel PC-1866 at 2000MHz with Bloomfield versus 8GB of Dual-Channel PC1866 at 1867MHz, the newer plaform stll wins.

We will keep our settings and hardware the same and now run the detailed tests of the basic version of PCMark 7

PCMark 7

We are testing at the same settings that we tested with PC Mark Vantage.  First up is the i7-920:

Now the 3770K is up next with the same settings and overclock.

We notice that the IPC of Ivy Bridge is higher, clock for clock than Bloomfield.  The synthetic tests clearly show that the newer architecture is faster.  Will this hold true for gaming?

Before we look at gaming differences, we need to look at more benchmarks including real world applications that many of us use daily, including calculation, file copying, SSD testing, encoding video, multi-tasking, image editing and gaming.

 

More Tests

 

Super Pi

Here is the test and we choose 1 million digits.

First up is Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz.

Here is Super Pi on the Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz

 

Ivy is faster by a second. And this is a single-threaded application. Please continue on to Fritz Chess Bench.

 

Fritz Chess Bench

Fritz Chess Benchmark is found within the game’s program files and basically it crunches numbers to test your processor’s speed. Deep Fritz takes advantage of massive calculations and multi-threaded performance to work any CPU fully. It loads all threads 100% and will drive your CPU temperatures way up.

First the Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz:

 

Besides showing relative speed when compared to a P3 1.0GHz CPU, it also shows the nodes completed. The faster your CPU, the more nodes completed. next up is the Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz.

 

Here in a multi-threaded benchmark, Ivy Bridge at 4.2GHz is faster clock-for-clock than our aging and overclocked-to-the-max Core i7-920.

CustomPC Benchmark

CustomPC benchmark use widely available open-source applications to carry out the tasks that most of us perform on a regular basis. There are three tests, each of which measure different aspects of a PC’s performance. These tests themselves are not synthetic benchmarks but instead they use real world image, video and multi-tasking tasks to test the performance of your computer.

The tests are:

• GIMP Image Editing
• H.264 Video Encoding
• Multi-tasking

First these tests are run on the overclocked to 4.2GHz Core i7-920.

As usual we test next with the Core i7-3770K also at 4.2GHz.

Here are the results of Custom PC benchmarking expressed first as a graph and then as a chart:

Ivy Bridge is much faster at video encoding  and it wins in all three tests on our ECS motherboard while we observed on our mATX Gigabyte Z77 motherboard, the older CPU was slightly faster at multi-tasking and image editing.

CINEBENCH

CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s professional 3D content creation suite, CINEMA 4D. This latest 11.5 version of CINEBENCH can test up to 64 processor threads accurately and automatically.

First the i7-920 at 4.2GHz with the GTX 680 at reference clocks

Next, the Ivy Bridge Core i7 at 4.2GHz with the reference GTX 680 and the same settings.

Here is the Graph.

Ivy Bridge is much faster in both tests.

X264

Basically this test encodes a HD video clip into a x264 video file. The first pass is very quick and the second one is much slower and much more demanding of a task as it does the actual encoding. This benchmark is heavily mult-threaded. First up is the Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz

And now the Core i7-3770K.

As we can see, both passes are much quicker on Ivy Bridge. The newest architecture is favored in a heavily-multi-threaded task.

The next series of tests is going to focus on the hard disk drive (HDD) or SSD as a performance upgrade for both PCs

 

Crystal Disk Mark

CrystalDiskMark is a HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to measure sequential and random read/write speeds. Here are some key features of “CrystalDiskMark”:

• Measure sequential reads/writes speed
• Measure random 512KB, 4KB, 4KB (Queue Depth=32) reads/writes speed

First up is the i7-920

Now the 3770K

The Ivy Bridge platform is quicker.    The writes differences would be much less due to using less expensive NAND in the HyperX 3K SSD than they are due to the higher bandwidth of the Ivy Bridge platform.

HD Tune

HD Tune is a hard disk utility which has the following functions:

• Benchmark measures the performance of:
  • Transfer Rate
  • Access Time
  • CPU Usage
  • Burst Rate
  • Random Access test
  • Write benchmark
• Hard Disk information which includes partition information, supported features, firmware version, serial number, disk capacity, buffer size, transfer mode
• Hard Disk Health
  • S.M.A.R.T. Information (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)
  • Power On Time
• Error scan
• Temperature display

The Bloomfield platform is up first.

Next the i7-3770K

These two Kingston Hyper-X SSDs are very close in performance and we will compare them to each other in an upcoming evaluation with another Kingston consumer-grade SSD next month.

 

 

AS SSD

AS SSD is especially designed for Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains synthetic and practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD without use of the operating system caches. In Seq-test the program measures how long it takes to read and write a 1 GB file. In the 4K test, read and write performance for random 4K blocks are determined. The 4K-64-thrd test are similar to the 4K procedure except that the read and write operations on 64 threads are distributed as in the usual start of a program.

In the copying test, two large ISO file folders are created, programs with many small files, and a games folder with small and large files. These three folders are copied by the OS copy command with the cache turned on. The practice tests show performance with simultaneous read and write operations

AS SSD gives an overall “score” after it runs the benchmarks.  These scores and comparisons are summed up in the performance summary charts.

First up, i7-920

Now the i7-3770k

Ivy’s plaform is faster.

 

ATTO

ATTO is a disk benchmark.  The ATTO Disk Benchmark  measures a storage system;s performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Options are available to customize the tests, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode.

First up is i7-920.

Now 3770K

Very similar results.

 

HD Tach

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices iincluding SSDs and HDDs. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and low level Windows interfaces to determine the physical performance of the device.

Here is the Long Bench with Bloomfield.

Now we repeat the same test with Ivy Bridge with identical settings.

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With this test, we are just measuring the slight differences between the SSDs.  There really isn’t any except in the quality of the NAND.

 

Folder copy

Here is a task that we all carry out and it shows the superiority of USB 3.0 over 2.0.  Only Ivy Bridge natively supports it for Intel platforms; not even Sandy Bridge.  Ivy Bridge also brings PCIe 3.0 although it is available to Sandy Bridge owners through BIOS updates for suitable motherboards.

Here we copy 10GB from a 32GB Kingston DataTraveler Elite 3.0 USB Flash drive to a folder on the desktop.  First up is the i7-920 platform and it takes 5 minutes and 24 seconds.

Now the 3770K, to copy from the flash drive is 2 minutes and 35 seconds.   It’s more than twice as quick!

Now we copy the same 10GB folder from our SSD’s desktop – one folder on the SSD to another – 122 seconds on Bloomfield and 90 seconds on Ivy!  And to copy from the desktop to the Kingston DataTraveler Elite 3.0 takes 7 minutes 33 seconds on Bloomfield and 5 minutes 53 on Ivy.

Check out the charts and see how much time you have to waste with older tech.

We found this is quite practical as we moved our 104GB Steam folder from one SSD to another in under 10 minutes using the Ivy Bridge platform.  In contrast, it seemed to take forever on the Bloomfield platform and we lost track of the time as we went off to do something else.

Now we move on to game-related benchmarks and games.  Next up are the synthetics.

Game-related benchmarks

The synthetics

3DMark 11 and Vantage are useful tests to track changes within the same system and they are often used to give a rough comparison between platforms.

Vantage

First up we look at Vantage with a GTX 680 and i7-920 at 4.2GHz.

Very strange and it appears to be just driver-related to the impossibly low CPU score on ECS motherboard.  The same Core i7-3770K  on the Gigabyte mother board did well, scoring 38503 and just edging out the i7-920 at 4.2GHz

 

3DMark 11

Now we look at Futuremark’s latest DX11 graphics-heavy test.  First up is Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz paired with a reference clocked GTX 680.

Now we look at Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz paired with the same reference GTX 680:

In all cases, unlike with Vantage, Ivy Bridge is faster than Bloomfield in this synthetic graphics test.  Now let’s check CPU graphics

 

Integrated CPU HD 4000 Graphics and Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge – ECS Z77 vs Gigabyte Z77 motherboard – in gaming

This evaluation is focused on the Core i7-3770K in gaming. And since there are integrated HD 4000 Graphics built into the CPU, we will also bench it using it at low details and a low 720p resolution and compare it on both Z77 motherboards at the same (stock) settings.

 

The improvement over HD 3000 Graphics is significant. Finally, DX9 and DX10 games can play relatively smoothly at 720P and DX11 is a possiblity using HD 4000 graphics.  However, we have no explanation for the differences in 4 games.

Now let’s compare our overclocked Core i7-920 versus our Ivy Bridge i7-3770K using a GTX 680 at both stock and also overclocked speeds.

The Game Benchmarks with the GTX 680 and the GTX 690

Here are the benches for the Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz versus Core i7-3770 also at 4.2GHz.  All games have their setting completely maxed out and levels of AA are identified on the chart.  The GTX 680 and the GTX 690 are run at their reference clock speeds.

The first 3 columns use the GTX 680.  The first results column is the Ivy Bridge i7-3700K at 4.2GHz versus the Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz in the second column. The third column represents the Core i7-3700K at 4.8GHz to show Ivy’s scaling as it is overclocked further.

We now install our GTX 690 and the fourth column represents the Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz with 4GB of PC1800 at 1200MHz versus the same settings at 2000MHz in the fifth column.

The sixth column is the i7-3770K at 4.2GHz using DDR3 at 1333MHz versus using the same setup at 4.8GHz.  The seventh column increases the RAM speed to 1867MHz while the last column compares that same 4.8GHz overclock with 4GB DDR3 but now with 8GB of RAM at the same speeds.

Main Summary Charts

As you can see, the Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K at 4.2GHz pulls away from the older CPU in games that are not GPU-limited.  The differences are not significant, but when we further overclock Ivy Bridge to 4.8GHz, it pulls even further away from Bloomfield which is forever stuck at 4.2GHz.

If you are a gamer, you can definitely “get by” with an older CPU.  However, we saw the need to upgrade to Ivy Bridge more strongly indicated by most tasks other than gaming.

 

Let’s head for our conclusion.

 

Conclusion

It is clear to us that our highly overclocked Core i7-920 solution is nearing the end of it’s useful life as our flagship. We simply cannot push it further without exotic cooling and the new Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K easily surpases it at the same speeds!

We held back on upgrading to Sandy Bridge last year, partly because our X58 motherboard supports the full PCIe 2.0 16x+16x specification whereas Sandy Bridge is 8x+8x PCIe 2.0. Now that the PCIe bandwidth has been increased, 8x+8x PCIe 3.0 offers no disadvantage as we can see from benching with our GTX 690.

 

It now remains to be seen if AMD will be again competitive in the midrange as their new bulldozer FX architecture is barely able to compete with Sandy Bridge, never mind Ivy Bridge – at the costs of using much more power. AMD really needs to get their clockspeed much higher and their own roadmap indicates that they expect 10 to 15% more performance with “Piledriver” just to remain competitive with Intel.

Intel’s CPUs are powerful and even their entry-level CPUs offer a good value in gaming. The complaints with HD 3000 Graphics have been mostly been addressed for light gaming by HD 4000, although most DX11 games are still too demanding to run at good framerates even at a relatively low resolution. However, paired with a powerful video card like the GTX 680, the Core i7-3770K is the perfect match for high-end gaming and even multi-GPU.

ECS Z77H2-A2X Pros and Cons

Pros

• The ECS Golden Board Z77H2-AX2 is a beautiful-looking motherboard which accents gold on black
• The ECS Golden Series is a fully-featured Z77 motherboard with premium components that has proved itself to be stable and able to get a good 4.8GHz overclock on Core i7-3770K.
• ECS does exteme testing on their Golden Boards before shipping and they promise great warranty service if your motherboard ever needs RMA
• ECS’s Intel HD 4000 IG is sufficient for light 720p DX 11 gaming and is very useful by itself for a second or even a third display, or to troubleshoot PCIe graphics.
• USB 3.0 and PCIe 3.0 are important upgrades for speed and fast multi-video card graphics and this Z77 motherboard delivers taking full advantage of higher speed Kingston Hyper-X DDR3 and HyperX SSDs.
• In multi-tasking, encoding and almost every other task that we tested, the Ivy Bridge architecture is much faster clock-for-clock than Core i7-920.

Cons

• The ECS BIOS could be more fully featured with better options for CPU overclocking.
• The positioning of the CMOS reset is awful – under a full sized video card – and it should be moved to the IO panel.
• $220 is pricey for a Z77 motherboard with similar features

 

We feel that ECS has made good progress over the past couple of years in delivering a stable, full-featured and very good-looking motherboard and it deserves ABT’s Editor’s Choice Award.

We believe that Intel’s new Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K completely leaves behind the older platform in every way – at the very least simply by virtue of a +600MHz overclock.  If you are primarily a gamer, you can get by even with a GTX 690 on Bloomfield, but an upgrade to Ivy Bridge will allow you to take full advantage of the latest technology including the fastest DDR3 and SSDs for faster *everything*.

We were very impressed with Kingston’s HyperX DDR3 PC1866 as an upgrade over PC1800 – there is a real increase even in gaming performance with it.  Considering that it is currently $35.99 for a 2x2GB kit at Newegg, it deserves ABT’s Great Value Award!

And Kingston’s HyperX SSD are an absolute joy to benchmark with compared to benching with HDD!  Using them has literally saved many hours in performing this evaluation.

We are looking forward to our follow up evaluation which will feature Kingston’s HyperX SSDs and HyperX PC1866 right after we publish our Thermaltake Overseer RX-I case evaluation this week.  And we shall also continue on with our goal in pursuit of 5.0Ghz using Thermaltake’s Water2.0 Pro and Notcua’s NH-DH14 as we have received an EVGA FTW Z77 motherboard that we are testing right now.

 

Make sure you follow us on our ABT forum. You will get the very latest news about Core i7-3770K and upcoming new graphics cards. We will continue to benchmark our new CPU and you can also help us on the forum and make suggestions for future evaluations.

Happy Gaming!

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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«1. Platform Upgrade Introduction2. Unboxing & Installation - Air or Watercooling?3. Inside the ECS Z77H2-A2X BIOS4. Overclocking, HyperX DDR3 and SSDs5. Test Configuration6. Synthetic Benchmark Suite7. More Tests8. Gaming Benchmarks & Summary Charts9. Conclusion10. View All»