Ivy Bridge vs Sandy Bridge vs Sandy Bridge-E @ 4.7GHz Preview

Intel's Core i7-3770K (ES) vs i7-2600K vs i7-3960X, nuff said!

We have also included a brief USB 3.0 controller shootout inside, involving the new Z77 (Panther Point) Native USB implementation and other popular solutions.

Prior Reading Disclaimer / Warning:

The Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K (recent engineering sample) results might or might not be indicative of final retail performance, and is not supported or sanctioned by Intel and their partners. As such, we will refrain from making judgements or opinions.

All test setups were equipped with 16GB of 2133MHz CL9 modules and both LGA1155 processors ran on a Z77 motherboard (brand and model not featured on our site so far).

CPU water cooled with Corsair H100, 1.34v linpack and prime stable @ 4.7GHz

Benchmarks:

Cinebench R11.5 (http://www.maxon.net/downloads/cinebench.html)

• Based on CINEMA 4D
• Shows near linear scaling with CPU clock speed.
• Performs a fair amount of floating point operations.

3DMark 11 Physics Test (http://www.futuremark.com)

• Rigid body physics simulation with a large number of objects
• Scales linearly with core count and frequency
• Test conducted with HD 7970

Euler3D (http://www.caselab.okstate.edu/research/euler3dbenchmark.html)

• AGARD 445.6 aeroelastic test wing (computational fluid dynamics)
• Does not scale very well with adding processors.
• Does not scale linearly with processor clock speed.
• Floating point intensive workload

LuxMark 2.0 (http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMark)

• Rendering engine based on SLG2 with Metropolis Light Transport, Multiple Importance Sampling, Image reconstruction done on the GPU, etc;
• Test conducted with ~2,000,000 triangles (Complex Room) setting

UCBench 2011 (http://anrieff.net/ucbench)

• RAR password cracker
• AES/SHA-1 units for decryption and support for SSE4/XOP instruction sets
• Scales with clock speed and cores

wPrime 2.07 1024M (http://www.wprime.net/)

• Recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions
• Scales with core count, clock speed and memory latency
• FP heavy

x264 FHD Benchmark 1.01 (http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=4189734)

• Created by Atak Snajpera
• Based on x264 free software codec
• Encode 1080p test sequence
• Supports SSE 4.1, SSE4.2, AVX