The king of the hill - Intel Core i7-3770K
Did you pick out your preferred Ivy Bridge chip on page four? We're leaning toward the power-saving Core i7-3770S ourselves, but there's no better place to start than the top-of-the-line Core i7-3770K.
Here it is sat alongside the best available Sandy Bridge part, Core i7-2700K. Both, remember, are served in the same LGA1155 package and are almost impossible to tell apart. Take our word for it, it's the second-generation Core i7-2700K on the left and the third-generation Core i7-3770K on the right.
Both are quad-core chips with hyper-threading, both are clocked at 3.5GHz with a maximum Turbo Boost of 3.9GHz, and both feature 8MB of last-level cache.
But they're not the same. The Sandy Bridge chip (left) is built on a 32nm process resulting in a die size of 216mm², has integrated HD 3000 graphics and a TDP of 95W. Moving things forward, the Ivy Bridge successor (right) is hewn from a 22nm node, features beefed-up HD 4000 graphics and reduces TDP to a cool 77W.
Everything we've seen thus far tells us to expect a modest bump in CPU performance (10 per cent ought to do it) coupled with a healthier jump in GPU capabilities. Let's plug it in and see how it plays out.
