Conclusion

In the past few months we have published a lot of these CPU gaming performance articles. So far we've always compared two models with one another to give direct advice if an upgrade would be worth your money or not. Since quite a few readers have been asking to compare Haswell, Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge in one article, well here it is. Last week we've been looking at quad core CPUs without Hyperthreading and this week it's time to have a closer look Sandy, Ivy and Haswell with HT.

Especially when the graphics card is the bottleneck in your setup, performance differences are virtually inexistent and when even overclocking all CPUs to a whopping 4.5 GHz doesn't change anything on these results, then it can be considered as proven, that the CPU is really not crucial in a gaming setup. As long as a graphics card, when dealing with high resolutions, can account quickly for a 20 to 50 percent performance bump at high-resolutions, then the single digit change you get by swapping CPUs doesn't matter at all. If you only use your computer for gaming, then buying always the latest CPU is a waste of money. Apparently when reducing resolutions drastically, or in other words opening the bottleneck of the VGA, then you clearly see that there have actually been improvements made.

Having a closer look at test results conducted with high resolutions, shows the same surprise we already found with quad core parts without HT, which means that Ivy Bridge is a tiny little bit faster than Haswell. The only thing that actually went different than expected was the Core i7-2600K being slower than the other CPUs. In case of lower resolutions, or in other words open the VGA bottleneck, we measured three percent performance difference between the Core i7-2600K and the Core i7-3770K as well as another four percent between the Core i7-3770K and the Core i7-4770K.

When it comes to power consumption, we once again see, that the Core i7-3770K is the CPU that convinces the most. Equipped with the CPU our test system needed the least power. Overall we can say, that since Sandy Bridge there have been some improvements, but from Ivy Bridge to Haswell there is nothing more than stagnation. Should you have bought a Core i7-3770K then there is really no need at all to move to a Haswell CPU. Gaming performance between Haswell and Ivy Bridge is almost identical and Ivy Bridge even runs more efficiently. Other than that Ivy Bridge runs cooler, which means it can be overclocked better. Overall we come to the conclusion that if you bought an Ivy Bridge CPU back in the days, that was a really good decision.

[Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Far Cry 3
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 12 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 3	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 14 - Performance Index
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2