Ivy Bridge 3770K Gaming results vs Core i7-920 at 4.2GHz
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 watercooling and the new Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K easily replaces it – at stock speeds! We also note that we did not even attempt a higher overclock than 4.2GHz for the new processor as our time with it until now is way too limited. We deliberately chose our lowest-end CPU cooler, and temperatures are still quite reasonable with a mild overclock. With a better cooler, such as our Noctua NH-DH14, we expect to push the clockspeeds well in excess of 4.5GHz.
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 whatsoever and we look forward to a future comparison between the two specifications using GTX 680 SLI.
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 – at the costs of using much more power. AMD really need 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 Sandy Bridge Core i3-2105 offers 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.
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. Best of all, there is a great upgrade path with Ivy Bridge Socket 1155 if you already have a Z68 motherboard as Intel’s next generation CPUs are a drop-in upgrade with a BIOS update for those currently with lower-end Sandy Bridge processors. And some other older Sandy Bridge motherboards are also compatible, although perhaps with less than full functionality. Or one can opt for one the very latest Series 7 motherboard which we will compare to Z68 platform in a future evaluation.
Core i7-3770K Pros and Cons
Pros
- Core i7-3770K offers a great experience for gaming when paired with a capable video card
- Intel’s 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.
- Power consumption is fantastic at only 77W compared to nearly double that of its competition.
- Not much in the way of cooling fans are required to cool it and an Ivy Bridge CPU would be the foundation of a great platform for a powerful HTPC (home theater PC).
- Overclocking is easy and there appears to be a lot of headroom to increase performance.
- In multi-tasking, encoding and most other tasks, the Ivy Bridge architecture is much faster clock-for-clock than Core i7-920.
Cons
- None
We believe that Intel’s new Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K by virtue of its included HD 4000 Graphics and a very powerful quad-core processor complimented by Hyper-Threading, offers great features while saving energy. It is highly recommended even though we have not yet completed our evaluation of it.
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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Good Job,but there are many other avenues to explore 😉
Thank-you. We got our i7-3770K a couple of weeks later than the other tech sites so our review focused narrowly on gaming. There will be many follow-up articles. The next one will feature overclocking. We are always glad to work with ABT forum to focus on what our members want to see next.
Super-awesome review, dammit!
Hey, nice review! Just a little tip: Use Super PI mod 1.5 XS instead and you will be able to see the seconds with 3 more digits precision. In your test you have no idea if the Ivy was at 8,995 sec and the 920 at 9,054 or if the ivy was at 8.006 and the 920 at 9,962, for example, there’s quite a big difference.
Oh and btw, any idea when we might see the continuation part on SLI / CF scaling and CPU bottleneck investigation with SLI / CF systems?
Thank-you!
Actually, I did get the results but couldn’t find the right screenshot any longer (this was a particularly hurried evaluation as we got our MB set up on Friday and the evaluation was published the following Monday). 😛
–From my memory, Ivy is nearly a full second faster.
Next up is “Overclocking Ivy” with Noctua NH-DH14. And there is scheduled for next month the continuation of SLI/CF scaling with several CPUs:
Phenom II X2/X4, FX-8150, Core i3-2105, Core i7-920 and Core i7-3770K.
Hey Mark! Good review.
Looking at your i7 920 @ 4.2ghz benches with an overclocked 680, a 4.2ghz IVB couldn’t beat it by anything meaningful. I say there is absolutely no legitimate reason to upgrade for games alone. The power consumption savings are substantial with IVB and USB 3.0 is great, but from a performance stand-point the 920 @ 4.2ghz is not bottlenecking a single 680 just yet.
Unless you are getting the parts for free, I’d wait until Haswell. Otherwise, you will have upgraded to IVB for no apparent reason and then when 22nm 3D transistors mature, Haswell will bring 15% increase in IPC and most likely superior overclocking to IVB. Then there will be other standard features such as AVX2.0 instruction set, 2-3x increase in IGP speed, 6 SATA 3.0 and 6 USB 3.0 native ports, and Thunderbolt.
Socket 1155 is a dead-end socket. I feel like IVB is easily a pass as it doesn’t provide a viable upgrade path for 1st generation i7 920/860 @ 3.9-4.2ghz users and SB users would be simply wasting $$.
It would be interesting if the CPU bottleneck can show up with 2x GTX680s and if 3770K is overclocked to 4.5-4.6ghz. Until then, for 99% of users, I feel like IVB is simply not a performance upgrade from i7 @ 4.0ghz+ for gaming.
Thank-you for your compliment, comments and feedback.
I only had 3 days with Ivy. The follow up evaluation will be a lot more positive for gaming as she can be overclocked to 4.8GHz with 1.425V using a Noctua NH-DH-14 (expect a CPU cooler eval soon!). For day-to-day benching, I am using 4.6GHz with 1.3V which is quite reasonable as the temperatures are still good under max load.
You will see advantages with just the increased clockspeed alone in an upcoming review; and you will get your wish to see what faster graphics will do on the Ivy platform with the equivalent of SLI’d GTX 680s on PCIe 3.0 with the full 16X bandwidth. My platform has also moved from HDD to 240GB Kingston HyperX SSDs.
That said, for most PC gamers with a GTX 680 or HD 7970 class of card at 1920×1080 or above, a highly overclocked Q9550S is probably sufficient for most gaming.
In my opinion after spending more time with the i7-3770K, the upgrade over Bloomfield is very useful for everything – including highest-end gaming.
I’m not seeing anything in those gaming benchmarks to convince me to ditch my overclocked Core i7-920 for an Ivy Bridge CPU as the former matches the latter in almost every game whereas the latter is bizarrely slower in some (maybe because of X58 triple channel memory vs. IVB dual channel memory?). Yes, the power saving would be nice and the Ivy Bridge CPU can be pushed beyond 4.2 GHz but I personally don’t think it’s worth the cost of replacing my CPU and motherboard for the sake of a few frames per second, which I likely wouldn’t notice as I play all my games v-synced on a 60 Hz 1920×1200 display. The GTX 680 certainly isn’t bottlenecked by the PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot either so I’m more than happy to wait for Haswell.
You mean you haven’t seen anything – yet.
Come back in a few hours and see if you think an i7-920 at 4.2GHz can take full advantage of a GTX 690. The old Bloomfield does great with any single GPU but it is maxed out at 4.2GHz whereas the i7-3770K can clock to 4.8GHz.
I am actually looking to put Ivy under water to see if 5.0GHz isn’t attainable. Some games can definitely use the faster CPU with powerful multi-GPU graphics.
i7 920 rocks! I’ve been rocking it since 2008 and 5 years on it still amazes me! No reason whatsoever to upgrade – I look forward to a few more years of gaming with it!
+1 Stephanos82
It’s amazing to see the i7 920 going head to head with a 2013 high end cpu (an i7 975 would have been a fairer match IMO)! But look at that i7 920 fight – beating the 3770k in most game benchs when both coed to 4.2Ghz! Congrats – and respect to the little 920!
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I’m still running an i7-860 @ 3.8Ghz in May 2015. I got it in 2009.
For the games I’ve been playing – it’s still fine – Battlefield 4, Dragon Age:Inquisition, Wolfenstein,Shadow of Mordor.
If I’m still getting between 50-60 frames per second in 2015 with my CPU, I see no reason to get a new shiny toy…not yet anyway.
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