Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K quad-core CPU Reg Hardware PC Week Intel loves marketing jargon for most things it produces, and the company’s processor architecture roadmap is no different. In Intel speak, this moves along in "Tick-Tock" sequence. The Tock refers to a major revamp to the core architecture, while the Tick covers changes to the manufacturing process. …
When compared to Sandy Bridge, yes. But whilst Intel are unquestionably occupying the top of the performance tower, cheaper apartments further down, are all being sold by AMD. How much of what most people do day to day is CPU bound and how much by disk or graphics? AMD can't compete with Intel in the arena of Who Has The Highest Numbers, but with their new combined GPU-CPUs, they are absolutely taking the crown in the Does What I Want For Significantly Less arena.
I think Intel know this. If AMD foundries could actually keep up with demand, they'd be the default for most of the of new tablet, netbook and laptop designs right now. Low power, built in Radeon graphics and good performance (just not elite performance like Intel's headline grabbers). And their parallisation is good which keeps them in the server market too.
I have to say since the advent of dual cores I've struggled to justify subsequent CPU upgrades.
If I was brutally honest I could still be getting by fine with my old Opteron 180.
My main laptop uses just a CULV Intel 1.3Ghz dual core in it.
I find I go longer and longer between upgrades. I haven't paid more than £100 for a new CPU in years. The last one cost £60.
Unless you are looking for a cure for cancer, transcoding video all day or just love wasting your life with pointless synthetic benchmarks for bragging rights, most folks don't need to either.
Well for a point of reference, the work I do is very CPU and memory bound. I spent quite a bit of time looking at Ivy Bridge and the alternatives, and went for a 3570k (quad-core Ivy Bridge but without Hyper Threading). Performance for well behaved multi threaded programs is identical to the 3770, but there's a near on £80 price difference.
Was the cpu voltage increased for that stable overclock? And are we talking stock cooler?
I have the Noctua D14, so temps were not a problem for me, but I had to up the juice to get 3770k stable at higher speeds. Did you test with prime95 or anything similar?
I only ask because otherwise this article could be a little misleading.
Very misleading as UEFI is the replacement for the "BIOS" system we all know.
UEFI is a completely different system all together. To take advantage of the full UEFI features you need a UEFI OS that has a UEFI boot loader, a good example is Windows Vista/7 or Ubuntu. On UEFI based systems, they will appear on the GUI as seperate items from standard drives.
I'm not an overclocking fanmyself, but there's no denying that a CPU running at 20% higher MHz can do 20% more calculations in a given time, which is after all the core purpose of a processor.
Whether or not you can actually make use of this depends what you do with your PC. For gaming the bottleneck is almost always the graphics card rather than the CPU, but for more 'workstation' type loads such as rendering or video encoding upping the multiplier will most definitely result in more stuff getting done in the same time.
Not sure what you're on about when you're talking about 'how fast you can feed the CPU', you seem to be suggesting there is some sort of motherboard/bus-related bottleneck which is just plain wrong.
That used to be true, but nowadays the CPU has loads or more and more complex AI stuff to handle while it sends things to the GPU, so it no longer always works that way.
Case in point : my Supreme Commander game got a lot more fluid when I got my 8-core i7 960, even before I upgraded from my X850 to my Radeon 5870.
I think that, with today's much more complex games, more CPU horsepower is just as important as GPU horsepower.
Unless the programming is done by clueless monkeys, in which case you can throw as many resources you want at it and it'll still run like a dog (ie any version of Microsoft Flight, and that's far from the only example).
An i7 960 would be a quad core - 8 threads with HT.
To the usual chorus of who needs all that power? Plenty! If you are still happy with <2GHz era chips then fine but many of us do lots more than write text and answer emails.
I upgraded my old dual core to a hex core 3930K just before Christmas and am using software that pegs all 12 threads
...from a i7 920 to a 3770K and, for my purposes, it a great upgrade. Benchmark rendering in 3dsmax gave me a 388% performance increase. If you're upgrading from Sandy Bridge may it may not be worth it but if you skipped that then I'd recommend.
One thing I wasn't expecting was the power usage. I used to have an "intelligent" powerstrip that would switch off all the peripherals when my machine went to sleep. Now when the machine is idle it doesn't draw enough power to trigger the other sockets.......
err, you're making it sound like a mouse bios is some kind of revelation...
You can set a bios a LOT faster and with less hand movement using the keyboard.
not sure who this would be a benefit to, unless this main board is meant to end up in an iPad, whose users probably shouldn't touch a bios by any method...
Obliquely reminds me of the days in the early 90's when PCs often had a "Turbo" button on the front, usually alongside a 7-segment numeric LED display (programmable via jumpers, which I wrote an app for my Psion to work out). Needless to say, turbo actually meant normal speed, and unless engaged, the CPU was typically underclocked by 50%.
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