Ivy Bridge
13 May 2012 9:34:52 UTC
Topic 196322
(moderation:
Hello,
I think about buying an Ivy Bridge I7 processor.
Does someone here already have one? How much speed gain is there compared with Sandy Bridge at the same clock?
What about power consumption?
Cheers,
Pawel
Ivy Bridge
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Guru3D has a nice review of the Ivy Bridge processor that you might take a look at.
Review
Ivy Bridge Power Consumption
If you plan to run GPU tasks with two or more GPUs, I think the Intel 3820 would be the better choice as the 3820 has 40 PCI-E lanes available which is beneficial for Einstein CUDA apps. The CUDA apps depend on both the CPU and GPU and as a result, the GPU runs best via an x16 slot. The current Ivy Bridge processors have 16 PCI-E lanes which would be good for a single GPU with this project.
The socket 2011 processors (3820,3930,3960) also support PCI-E 3.0 like Ivy Bridge does although socket 2011 is not officially certified for 3.0 by Intel at this point.
Agreed with the statement
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Agreed with the statement about 2011 being best because of the extra lanes. It is however, not the 2011 chips that NVIDIA is certifying, but the motherboards. The chips are PCIE 3.0 capable, Intel doesn't say this, since when these chips came out there were no 3.0 GPUs to test them on. ATI have shown that 2011 will run at 3.0 speeds, but NVIDIA is currently certifying the motherboards.
Ivy Bridge does not OC as well, due to the extra amount of heat they put off, which is quite a lot.
I've been running a i7-3770K
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I've been running a i7-3770K at stock for about a week now and below is a comparison with a stock i7-2600K for the S6LV Gravity Wave (GW) jobs. You asked about a clock-for-clock comparison, but I have not yet gotten to that at the moment. There are plenty of people who run these at stock so hopefully this quick look can be useful.
2600K: 4 GW jobs = 13100 sec @ 140 watts;
3770K: 4 GW jobs = 12230 sec @ 112 watts;
2600K: 8 GW jobs = 20093 sec @ 153 watts;
3770K: 8 GW jobs = 16230 sec @ 122 watts;
The i7-3770K is running on an ASUS board whichs seems to automatically overclock without user intervention and CPU-Z reports that it is running at 3.7 GHz versus the i7-2600K running at 3.4 GHz.
Taking the clock speed difference into account, the speed per GW job is equal when running 4 concurrent jobs, but the 3770K is quite a bit faster when running 8 concurrent jobs. I'm not sure if that can be accounted for by a switch to Windows 7 (from Linux) on the 3770 or some Ivy Bridge architecture improvement for hyper-threading.
But in line with most reviews, the Ivy Bridge i7-3770K uses less power at stock to process the Gravity Wave jobs here on Einstein by around 30 watts (total power for computer at the wall minus the monitor).