Intel Ivy Bridge 3770K and Z77 Chipset Reviewed

Overclocking

On the topic of overclocking, Ivy Bridge is a different animal while still being the same beast. In a sense, overclocking this chip really isn't hard. Actually, we'd say it was quite easy. We were able to attain 4.6 and 4.7 GHz pretty quickly and easily as we have traditionally been able to do on Sandy Bridge architecture based processors. Unfortunately, though, we didn't really get any additional overclocking potential out of this chip than we did out of the other i7 processors that we have tested, including the 3820 and 3960X.

Cinebench performance at 4.9GHz

Looking at actual performance increases, we were able to test both the Cinebench and x264 HD Benchmarks to show how much of an increase of performance was realized under a 4.9GHz overclock.

In Cinebench we were able to realize an increase from 7.93 to 9.95. The increase from 3.9 GHz to 4.9 GHz translates into a 25% overclock and the performance differential is more around 20%, which is still pretty good considering how close it is to a linear improvement.

In the x264 HD Benchmark, we were able to increase our performance at 4.9 GHz to 213.47 fps in pass 1 and 54.66 fps in pass 2. This is an increase of 23.7% in pass 1 and 24.9% in pass 2. These two benchmarks are actually much closer to our 25% overclock in terms of linear improvement than Cinebench was and the pass 2 performance was almost exactly the same as our overclock percentage which is actually astonishing as linear improvements are very rare.
 
We were able to squeeze out 4.9GHz, which is actually the best overclock that we've been able to achieve on water. But, even on water we had to pump far too much voltage into the chip to actually make it stable (1.41v). We spent countless hours trying to get 5GHz stable on water and it simply would not happen. While we are not entirely sure if it was our motherboard or the processor, we haven't seen anything about this chip that is revolutionary when it comes to overclocking. It really is a different animal but still the same beast, there is no doubt that it is an awesome overclocking chip, it just isn't really that much more awesome, in our eyes.


Temperatures and Power Consumption

In terms of temperatures and power consumption, the 3770K didn't really perform out of expectations whatsoever. This chip is an extremely low wattage chip and as a result of the higher frequency has about the same thermals as Sandy Bridge.

Here, you can see that even under full load the full CPU package does not surpass 50W of power consumption and that the cores themselves consume 41w while the GPU consumes under 1W (not under load).

Here, we can see that the power consumption stays pretty low and that the CPU never actually consumes more than 50W. You can also see the CPU temperatures under stock settings and under load the CPU under load tends to idle around 40C which is pretty good when you consider that it is running at 100% load. You also have to take into consideration that we are running a 180mm water cooling system on this CPU and that also can have an effect on how cool the CPU may run. But generally speaking, these temperatures are good and around the ballpark we'd expect.