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Intel Core i7-3770K Review: A Small Step Up From Sandy Bridge

Intel Core i7-3770K Review: A Small Step Up From Sandy Bridge
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Both AMD and Intel know that great products create lofty expectations. When you follow up an Athlon with an Athlon 64, or a Core 2 with a Core i7, customers start looking for big progress from subsequent generations, too.

Well, we all know that Sandy Bridge was a home run on the desktop. Can all of the enthusiasts who posted to forums about waiting for Ivy Bridge really be faulted for hoping to see another round of impressive performance gains?

Ivy Bridge was never projected to be as impactful as its predecessor, though. The company’s “tick-tock” cadence defines alternating steps forward in processor architecture and manufacturing technology. When Intel pulls off a successful new design based on mature lithography, the improvements tend to be big, bold, and beautiful. Nehalem and Sandy Bridge, both “tocks,” left us satisfied and smiling. A process shrink typically introduces other benefits, such as smaller dies and power savings. Benchmark results, however, typically don't change as drastically. 

Westmere was Intel’s most recent “tick,” heralding the arrival of 32 nm transistors. The company used more diminutive geometry to create room for additional cores on its fastest desktop-oriented CPUs, giving us chips like the Core i7-990X.

Today’s Ivy Bridge launch represents the next “tick”—a 22 nm die shrink of the same fundamental architecture we already know as Sandy Bridge. Intel is calling it a “tick-plus,” though, because there actually are a few under-the-hood improvements.

Unfortunately for desktop enthusiasts, the most significant changes center on the design’s integrated graphics engine, which most of us simply don’t utilize.  

Naturally, the story is different in the mobile space, where lower power consumption and “fast enough” 3D capabilities combine to enable big battery life numbers and surprisingly acceptable performance. But today’s Core i7-3770K review doesn’t cover a mobile processor. Rather, we’re looking at Intel’s fastest multiplier-unlocked model, positioned to succeed the existing Core i7-2700K and -2600K.

Meet Ivy Bridge

Intel built Sandy Bridge-based chips in three different configurations: one quad-core and two dual-core designs. The most complex implementation included 995 million transistors in a 216 mm² piece of silicon. In comparison, the biggest Ivy Bridge die incorporates 1.4 billion transistors on a 160 mm² die.

If you were to show your grandmother die shots of Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, she should be able to point out where most of those 400 million new transistors were added. Clearly, the built-in graphics engine is more prominent.

Much of the expansion is attributable to an increase in execution units—the programmable shaders responsible for graphics processing—which Intel claims boost 3D performance by as much as 2x. Sandy Bridge’s HD Graphics 3000 employed 12 EUs; Ivy Bridge’s HD Graphics 4000 pushes that number to 16. HD Graphics 4000 also uniquely supports DirectX 11, up to three display outputs, OpenCL and DirectCompute, and better Quick Sync performance, all of which we’ll test for you.

The rest of the layout should look fairly familiar. Given a mainstream focus, the die driving Core i7-3770K is a quad-core, Hyper-Threaded part with 8 MB of shared L3 cache divided up into four 2 MB slices, same as the Core i7-2600K we reviewed more than a year ago. There are a handful of small tweaks to what the cores themselves can do. Intel says that those adjustments, plus tweaks in the cache and memory controller, help improve the number of instructions per clock cycle this architecture executes. We’ll be running per-clock comparisons between Ivy and Sandy Bridge to help quantify those claims as well.


Cores / Threads
Base Freq.
Max. Turbo
L3 Cache
HD Graphics
Graphics Base Freq.
Graphics Max. Freq.
TDP (W)
Price
Third-Gen Core i7 Family
-3770K
4/8
3.5 GHz
3.9 GHz
8 MB
4000650 MHz
1.15 GHz77
£250
-3770
4/83.4 GHz
3.9 GHz
8 MB
4000650 MHz1.15 GHz77
£230
-3770T
4/82.5 GHz
3.7 GHz
8 MB
4000650 MHz1.15 GHz45
£220
-3770S
4/83.1 GHz
3.9 GHz
8 MB
4000650 MHz1.15 GHz65
£230
Third-Gen Core i5 Family
-3570K
4/4
3.4 GHz
3.8 GHz
6 MB4000
650 MHz1.15 GHz77
£175
-3570T
4/42.3 GHz
3.3 GHz
6 MB2500
650 MHz1.15 GHz45
£165
-35704/43.4 GHz
3.8 GHz
6 MB2500650 MHz1.15 GHz77
£172
-3550
4/43.3 GHz
3.7 GHz
6 MB2500650 MHz1.15 GHz77
£163
-3550S
4/43.0 GHz
3.7 GHz
6 MB2500650 MHz1.15 GHz
65
£165
-3470
4/43.2 GHz
3.6 GHz
6 MB
2500650 MHz1.1 GHz
77
?
-3470T
2/4
2.9 GHz
3.5 GHz
3 MB
2500650 MHz1.05 GHz
35
?
-3470S
4/42.9 GHz
3.6 GHz
6 MB2500650 MHz1.1 GHz
65
?
-3450
4/43.1 GHz
3.5 GHz
6 MB2500650 MHz1.1 GHz
77
£145
-3450S
4/42.8 GHz
3.5 GHz
6 MB2500650 MHz1.1 GHz
65
£147


We’re still looking at a dual-channel memory controller, though it’s now rated for DDR3-1600 data rates. Given the right memory, enthusiasts have the option to overclock as high as 2667 MT/s (up from 2133 MT/s) in more granular 200 MHz increments.

And although Ivy Bridge carries over Sandy Bridge’s 16 lanes of on-die PCI Express connectivity, we now have official PCIe 3.0 support for cards like AMD’s Radeon HD 7000s and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 680.

All told, Ivy Bridge is yet another highly integrated processor design from Intel. Its pieces were constructed by independent teams throughout the world—engineers in Israel are responsible for the IA cores, a team in Folsom, CA built the graphics engine, and a second team in Folsom implemented the interconnects, cache, and system agent. Of course, a process development group up in Oregon made sure it’d all come together on the new 22 nm node.

What is the final product capable of? Let’s walk through Ivy Bridge step by step, exploring where it excels and digging into where it falls short of the community’s expectations.

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  • 0 Hide
    SSri , 24 April 2012 05:15
    Thanks for the pretty quick review. The HD 4000 may be a tempting factor for many low-end desktop users. High-end users are unlikely to switch to IB. Unless extensive future reviews show a different picture, Sandy Bridge would be the CPU for my high-end new build!
  • 0 Hide
    HEXiT , 24 April 2012 06:15
    4% on average is a pretty small performance bump from a dye shrink i was hoping that ivy was gonna be in the region of 10% but i guess a small bump is better than none. still not a big enough jump for me to give up my old i7 920... ah well maybe haswell will deliver.
  • 0 Hide
    damian86 , 24 April 2012 08:48
    Well I think this will be improved in no-time, the guys are doing well in their new architecture and finding new ways to make the big jump. This is like testing, their stuff is good enough to get on the market and they can earn a lot of credits that will help them to keep working hard with new stuff.I really liked their quick sync thing.
    I still don't know the negative points in including gpus in cpus.
  • 1 Hide
    mi1ez , 24 April 2012 09:13
    US comp. You would think they could put that somewhere in the article.
  • 2 Hide
    kaprikawn , 24 April 2012 20:03
    I'm personally very excited by Ivy Bridge. I'm not planning on replacing the first gen i5 in my gaming rig, I can't see the benefit. But I'm looking at replacing the Sempron 1100LE in my server with one of the low power i3 chips when they come out. For a computer that runs 24/7, power consumption and noise are fairly important to me for that machine. The Sempron and the low end i3 have similar TPD ratings, but there's a gulf of difference in performance.
  • 1 Hide
    Anonymous , 25 April 2012 21:36
    An unlocked, "K" variant of the i3, or Pentium-G? That might get people excited...
  • -1 Hide
    K3v1n , 29 April 2012 16:53
    I'm happy with my FX-6100...Even if I had the money, I wouldn't upgrade it, except for maybe a 8150. This CPU is amazing, and no review on here or anywhere really does it justice. It handles every game i throw, I can convert a 6gb HD video to MP4 in 5 mins WHILE photoshop, and a game is running
  • 0 Hide
    army_ant7 , 4 May 2012 06:45
    I still do wish that Intel offered a cheaper or more powerful CPU without the built-in GPU. It seems like a big waste of time, work, and die space (and maybe even money) for, esp. now, such a big GPU portion. But maybe from the business/profit-spending point of view, it really is better for Intel as a company to have GPU's built-in irregardless.

    I'm interested in hearing from anyone else's thoughts on this.
  • 0 Hide
    AndrewdAzotus , 7 November 2013 15:48
    I see and hear about the reasons for not upgrading from Sandy-bridge to Ivy-bridge, but I would be interested in pointers for someone who has not had a desktop for about 5 years but is now looking for a new architecture which will be as long lasting as possible so I can buy a good ($200-$300) motherboard and a cheaper processor with a view to upgrading all components (memory / graphics etc) on the motherboard as time and money permits. I'm thinking either 1150 or 2011 but would appreciate some general guidance