Intel Ivy Bridge Core i5 3570K & Core i7 3770K Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅20-04-12
Test Setup & Overclocking

CPUs
Intel Core i5 2500K (3.3GHz) Sandy Bridge
Intel Core i5 3570K (3.40GHz) Ivy Bridge
Intel Core i7 3770K (3.50GHz) Ivy Bridge
Cooling Alpenfohn K2 – Mount Doom
Motherboard MSI Z77A-GD65
Memory Corsair Vengeance 8GB 2133MHz CL11 DDR3
Graphics XFX R7970 Black Edition
Storage Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
PSU OCZ Fatal1ty 750W


In order to present a fair and reasonable comparison all CPUs will be tested on the Intel Z77 chipset. This is perfect for comparing Sandy Bridge vs Ivy Bridge since we can use the same motherboard for benchmarking due to both chips being LGA1155.



Overclocking

As previously mentioned in our Intel Core i5 Sandy Bridge Roundup – overclocking with Ivy Bridge is identical to Sandy Bridge. It is achieved by altering the multiplier rather than the BCLK. So the BCLK stays at 100MHz and the multiplier is modified. So if we have 100MHz on the BCLK and 40 for the multiplier this will obviously output 4GHz.



For this section of the review the maximum overclock was achieved by using the MSI Z77A-GD65 and monolith CPU cooler – Alpenfohn K2 with 2x 120mm and 1x 140mm fans. The multiplier for Core i5-3570K and Core i7-3770K was nudged up in small increments starting with 43 and upon booting into windows LinX was run 5 times in order to observe temperatures and confirm stability.

Intel Core i5-3570K

The 3750K managed to overclock up to 48 – 4.8GHz from 3.40GHz, a 41% overclock. This is a significant increase and required 1.38 vcore and PLL overvoltage enabled. I pushed for the 5GHz milestone but sadly the temperatures increased far too high under load when nudging up vcore to achieve such a frequency. The temperatures rose to over 90⁰C.



Intel Core i7-3770K

The 3770K managed to overclock up to 47 – 4.7GHz from 3.50GHz, a 38% overclock. Again this is an encouraging result. 4.7GHz required a vcore of 1.36v with PLL overvoltage enabled. As with the 3570K, I tried to get closer to the 5GHz mark but again increasing the voltage caused the heat to rise to unacceptable levels under load - beyond 90⁰C. In pursuit of anything above 4.7GHz even with a slight nudge to 1.38-1.4 though the temperatures weren’t an issue the system was unstable. Increasing the voltage was the key to attaining a higher frequency but this only worsened.



On the following pages we will be benchmarking our two Ivy Bridge CPUs at both stock and overclocked settings as per above. The stock settings are obviously at default - with turbo boost enabled. Our overclocked settings are fixed at the overclock frequency with turbo boost disabled.

13 pages « 3 4 5 6 > »

Comments