Platform upgrade: Core i7-920 vs i7-3770 at 4.2GHz featuring ECS Golden Series Motherboard and Kingston
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PC Mark Vantage was developed primarily for Vista and it has been superseded by PC Mark 7.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.
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.