Platform upgrade: Core i7-920 vs i7-3770 at 4.2GHz featuring ECS Golden Series Motherboard and Kingston
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.
No offense, but there are two main summary charts that are identical to each other. Is the second one supposed to show different games?
Don’t forget about the “[insert chart]” part! 😛
None taken. Thanks for pointing it out!
Fixed.
Never mind my previous comment, as it’s now fixed, thanks!
Of course, Civilization V does better with Ivy Bridge than with Bloomfield, all clocked the same. At 4.8GHz (IB), CivV is like 30% faster than Nehalem (Bloomfield) at 4.2GHz.
BUT what amazes me is that Nehalem still seems to be doing just as well as IB overall, clock-for-clock. In Crysis 2, Nehalem is like 15% faster than IB. At 4.2GHz, Nehalem still beats IB at 4.8 GHz in DX11 mode, by around 15%!! I was thinking of blaming it on the system memory bandwidth (with Nehalem using triple channel), but even at only 1200MHz, Nehalem still shines pretty much just as much as it does at 2000 MHz.
The case reverses in the favor of IB but only by a few percentage points for Crysis 1, LP2, HAWX2.
It goes to show that unless one is a serious Civilization V gamer, an overclocked Nehalem would be just fine for even a GTX 690. I would guess that Starcraft 2 and Skyrim (other CPU-limited games not tested here) are the only other games that show a noticeable improvement on the Ivy Bridge.
Thanks, apoppin for all of this benchmarking that pretty much nobody else on the ‘net have done with all of these games, on the still mighty Nehalem!!
Amazing work!
It would be one of these, but with an Athlon II X4 OC with maximum range and I7 3770K OC max.
Athlon X4 ~ 3.5Ghz vs 5Ghz i7 3770K for example
It would be interesting to see one of these with a single GPU both as a dual system which is where I think you will notice more.
Sorry for my English.
I have a 3770k and a I7 920. Its was a nice review because many people with older i7s are itching for an upgrade. I do think this review is biased in its language. The non scientific language of “Way Faster” vs saying its 8 percent faster is a dead give away. “What faster is subjective where a percentage is objective. Way faster to them seems to be any test that the Ivy beats the bloomfield in.
USB 3.0 ports are nice but can be installed in an older X58 board (they fail to mention)
For gaming its not worth the upgrade at all. For most windows tasks its not worth it.
For tasks that take hours then it might be worth it. Ie encoding, but here a 6 core would be better than a quad. So an upgrade to a 6 core might be cheaper on x58 than doing entire MB/RAM swap.
Not trying to rain on the parade but this review seems to want to justify the upgrade by using subjective wording rather than just stating the percentages.