Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge Processor Review

Name: Intel Core i7-3770K Processor
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, April 23, 2012, 12:01 PM EDT

Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory speed to DDR3-1600.

G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Memory Installed On MSI's Z77A-GD65 Motherboard

The solid state drives were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Intel and AMD - Head To Head

System 1:
Intel Core i7-3770K
(3.5GHz - Quad-Core)
Intel Core i7-2700K
(3.5GHz - Quad-Core)

MSI Z77A-GD65
(Z77 Express Chipset)

2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1600MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

System 2:
Cntel Core i7-3690X
(3.33GHz - Hex-Core)
Intel Core i7-3820
(3.6GHz - Quad-Core)

Asus P9X79 Deluxe
(X79 Express Chipset)

4x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1600MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

System 3:
Intel Core i7-990X
(3.43GHz Hex-Core)

Gigabyte EX58-UD4
(X58 Express Chipset)

3x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1333MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

System 4:
AMD FX 8150
(3.6GHz Eight-Core)

Asus CrossHair V Formula
(AMD 990FX Chipset)

2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1866MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Windows 7 x64

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2012

Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2012, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2012 suite with Intel's new Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) with 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard.

Core i7-3770K Processor Arithmetic	Core i7-3770K Processor Multimedia
Core i7-3770K Memory Bandwidth	Core i7-3770K Cache and Memory

The Core i7-3770K performed about as expected in the various SiSoft SANDRA tests that we ran. In put up the best scores of any quad-core processor in SANDRA's database in the Arithmetic benchmark, although it trailed the 2600K slightly in the integer portion of the Multimedia test. Memory bandwidth was strong, matching the triple-channel configuration of the aging X58 setup, and the Cache and Memory benchmark shows Ivy Bridge mostly matching or exceeding the performance of Sandy Bridge, save for a few tests with data sets in the middle range.