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Intel i7 “Ivy Bridge-E” about 10pc faster than current offerings

by Mark Tyson on 25 April 2013, 14:41

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Early tests on an Intel’s Core i7-4960X “Ivy Bridge-E” chip show that it is only about 10 per cent faster than the previous Core i7-3800/3900-series “Sandy Bridge-E” chips. The upcoming new Core i7-4960X chip has reportedly been tested by a member of a Chinese overclocking forum called Coolaler.com.

An honorary member of Coolaler by the name of “Toppc” has done a comparison test of the current top-of-the-range Intel Core i7-3970X “Sandy Bridge-E” processor with what he claims to be an Intel Core i7-4960X “Ivy Bridge-E” processor. In the second half of the year, when this chip is scheduled to be officially launched, it is supposed to be Intel’s fastest desktop chip. Looking at the benchmarks run by Toppc, the gains aren’t going to blow your socks off.

click to enlarge

TechPowerup reports that both chips were tested on an identical setup employing an MSI X79A-GD45 Plus with socket LGA2011 and an Intel X79 Express chipset. Toppc put the processors through comparative tests using SuperPi mod 1.6, CPU Mark '99, WPrime 1.63, Cinebench 11.5, 3DMark Vantage, and 3DMark 06 (the last two for CPU tests only).

Overall the “Ivy Bridge-E” chip won the day, beating the “Sandy Bridge-E” in every test by a range of between five and twelve per cent. Xbit labs put together a table of comparative results which is much clearer to look through than Toppc’s own collection of screengrabs. So I’ve included that table below for your convenience.

Table compiled by Xbit Labs

Overall it looks like there is not a great boost to be provided by Intel’s new high-end desktop (HEDT) processors, however they should be drop-in compatible with the LGA2011 board you already have, if you are one of those at the Intel cutting edge.



HEXUS Forums :: 10 Comments

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have home processors reached their pinacle until software catches up?…i wonder
The gains won't blow our socks off but they do mean that IVB-E is a better candidate for a workstation than Haswell, which, with 4 cores, was catching up with SB-E's 6 cores. The power savings of Haswell might have made them equal on the shortlist for some but IVB-E will raise that bar as well.
10% is quite sturdy, but I'd have to see how well they OC before considering.
The 100MHz could be expected to account for a 2.85% up bump if my math is correct even if no other improvements were there.

Noteworthy that this is probably a comparison between current top of range (70X) and future second in range (60X), so perhaps not a fair ££ equal comparison. 3960X-3970X gains you 200MHz base clock so we might expect a 4970X to be 3.8GHz, so another ~5-6% on top of the 4960X results.

This isn't exactly a full suite of benchmarks either so there might be other cases with bigger gains but I wouldn't expect so Ivy-Bridge E is just a die shrink of SB-E though right, so massive gains not to be expected and there might be other benefits like lower TDP, SB-E is 130W so could do with a drop! Intel are probably more focussed on TDP and cost than outright performance given that they are already waaaaaay ahead of AMD in most benchmarks already.

It's rarely of benefit to upgrade CPU every generation anymore, every 2-3 generations at least!
Hmmm I'm on an i7 860 at the moment running at 3.85GHz (up from 2.8) on air with a megahalems.

I am CPU bottlenecked in a game I dearly love at the moment, and would be very interested to upgrade CPU, but the incremental improvements seem to be rather disappointing. It's the lack of decent competition at the high end, unfortunately :(

Think I'll wait until the PS4 is out (I hate console games, but they will have impact on the whole gaming sector), Haswell is out and this is on the shelves. That should give me a better idea of overclockability of these chips (or Haswell). Ivy Bridge just seems so disappointing compared with Sandy Bridge - the base speed is creeping up, but the overclocking potential isn't going up at nearly the same rate :(