Conclusion

First of all: during the past years it was an absolute rarity that a new Intel CPU generation was compatible to an earlier chipset. Therefore we like it even more that Ivy Bridge also works in combination with Z68 and P67 Revision B3. The only thing you'll have to do is a BIOS update in order make the board compatible to the Ivy Bridge CPUs. Therefore it would be possible to upgrade a system you bought more than a year ago with the latest CPU. Furthermore it was time that there finally was native support for USB 3.0 via the PCH. With Z77 users finally get chipset native USB 3.0 support. What's also new is that Ivy bridge offers 16 PCI Express 3.0 lanes. Therefore expansion card which need a lot of bandwidth can profit from a throughput which has been doubled.

Quite honestly, Ivy Bridge's performance is just impressive. Frankly speaking: lower dissipation power, higher energy efficiency and more performance per clock, that's what Ivy Bridge offers over Sandy Bridge. With Ivy Bridge, Intel was able to leave Sandy Bridge behind performance wise, whereas Ivy Bridge only has a TDP of 77 Watts compared to the 95 Watt Sandy Bridge has to cope with. In single threaded benchmarks a Core i7-3770K is almost eleven percent faster than a Core i7-2600K and looking a multithreaded benchmarks reveals a 15 percent increase in performance over the Core i7-2600K.
What we also liked was the performance of the IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor). Although Intel is still running behind AMDs Llano there is a very significant increase compared to the HD 3000, which can be found in the Intel Core i7-2600K. If Intel keeps on pushing graphics performance like this, it will take chipzilla another two generations until they can finally keep up or even overtake AMD. The last thing, but definitely not the least, we look at is engery consumption. Especially when we used the integrated graphics processors it was excellent. In idle mode our test system which, equipped with a Core i7-3770K, needed as little as 35 Watts.

Another thing which has been improved, is the integrated memory controller. Although the standard fequency is still at 1600 MHz it's been quite easy to reach 2400 MHz or even 2667 MHz with high performance memory. In our Forum Roger (splmann) Tanner is playing with some 4 x 4 Gigabyte Corsair Vengenace memory and they're running at 1380 MHz (effective 2760 MHz). In a following article we'll show what will be the performance benefits when you increase the memory clocks by 1 GHz.

From today on you can buy a Core i7-3770K for 313 US-Dollar and the Core i5-3570K is available for as little as 212 US-Dollar. There is no doubt, the pricing for Ivy Bridge CPUs is very attractive. On the other hand this leaves a big questionmark behind the princing of Intels Extreme CPUs.