TR Forums

It's either going to be Ivy 3770K or Sandy 2700K.

Things going for Sandy:
- Runs cooler while overclocked.
- It's able to reach higher overclock speeds.
- Cheaper. Can get one for $289 on newegg right now.

Things going for Ivy:
- Latest and greatest
- Runs faster than Sandy at stock speeds.
- PCI 3.0 support

Although the logical choice would seem to be Ivy, it costs $60 more and I'm still not convinced that I'd be better off with one. I do intend on overclocking, but it's really not a deal breaker for me. My current build is a AMD Phenom II 940 3 GHz so either one is a huge upgrade. Overclocks aside, is Ivy $60 worth faster then Sandy?

Opinions?

Welcome to TR!

Where you need to start on this site is the fancy new System Guide. TR Editors are very good at explaining why they put a processor in a particular build.

What are you intending to do with this system? If its main purpose is gaming, an i5-3570K would work just as well for less money (see differences between 2500K and 2600K for examples). Also, do you live near a microcenter? If so they always have the cheapest processor prices around and you can take $50 off a motherboard when purchased with a CPU. In fact they sell the i7-3770K for $290 also (plus tax).

I'll second DPete27 on the i5 consideration - unless you're doing something that you think will heavily benefit from Hyperthreading, an i5's 4 cores may be a much cheaper and more appropriate way to go for you.

I'd go for PCI 3.0 support for future GPU's etc., although the practical advice given by "absurdity" and "DPete27" make a lot of sense as well.

I'm running a heavily overclocked 2500K.
Honestly, outside of software rendering, I can't see the point of i7's. 4.5GHz of quad core pretty much covers "overkill" these days. Spend the change on a better SSD, GPU or screen.

I agree with Chrispy, currently running a 4.5Ghz i5 2500k and its more than capable of anything I could hope to throw at it. The most strenuous frequent task it undergoes is gaming, and there has yet to be majorly challenged at 90 or even 120 FPS. You're paying a high premium for the top-end chips without the proportional performance increase.

Ivybridge is essentially the same as Sandybridge, but features slightly faster cores, better integrated graphics, less power consumption, and better on board graphics. It also has pcie 3.0 natively supported, however this does not do anything for current graphics cards. Unfortuenatly ivybridge runs much hotter than sandybridge, and offers only 3-5% overall performance increase.

I'll hop on the i5 bandwagon too. I actually have an i7-2600k, basically because I was spending enough on everything else the extra ~$100 was not significant to the overall build. But if I were being at all careful with my money today, I'd go with an i5.

As an aside, the reason I went with the i7 was because at the time games were making the jump from using 2 cores to using 4, and I was a little concerned that I'd regret it later. However, hyperthreading only nets about a 30% gain at most, and probably more like 10% in games, so you're looking at 4.4-5.2 effective "cores" of performance, and that's only if the application is heavily threaded. Many times there's a slight penalty for having hyperthreading enabled when gaming.