Benchmarks: CPU
That's an in interesting start, if the upgraded 3XS Z77 Performance GTX is armed with a cutting-edge Intel Ivy Bridge architecture, why is its i5-3570K marginally slower in our single-thread benchmark than the i5-2500K used in the previous Performance GTX?
It's all to do with the overclock. While Scan was confident in running the Sandy Bridge chip at 4.7GHz, it opts to keep the Ivy Bridge equivalent tuned in a touch lower at 4.6GHz. There's very little between the two.
Putting all the cores to work, however, swings the advantage in favour of the Ivy Bridge machine. Intel's architectural enhancements are enough to eke out that extra bit of performance, but whichever way you look at it, the i5-3570K isn't by any means a major step up in terms of performance over the older i5-2500K.
The CPU performance increase is negligible, but PCMark 7 takes a look at overall system speed and seems to suggest that the 3XS Z77 Performance GTX is a massive upgrade over the 3XS Performance GTX that was available a couple of months ago. The near-50 per cent boost in PCMarks is explained primarily by one component change - moving from a hard disk as the primary storage device to a 120GB Corsair Force Series 3 SSD really does make that much of a difference.
