Intel Ivy Bridge review

It’s fair to say Ivy Bridge – or 3rd Generation Intel Core to give the family its proper name – has stretched our patience these past few months. By Intel’s annually alternating tick-tock schedule – where a tick brings a die shrink and a tock, as Sandy Bridge was, means a whole new architecture – this tick was due to arrive several months ago. Perhaps that’s why Intel wants us to view it as more of a “tick-plus”, with added extras included.
It would have been sooner, but the industry’s first ever 22nm core was delayed due to manufacturing difficulties. Ivy Bridge uses Intel’s groundbreaking 3D Tri-Gate transistors, and with such advances often come poor early yields. But it’s finally ready for a full launch, and Intel has ensured the first batch of hardware is a big one.

The hardware

On the desktop, there are three Core i5s and two Core i7s, while laptops benefit from four Core i7s and the first Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition processor. Every one of them is quad core, with all but the three i5s also using Hyper-Threading.

Ivy Bridge introduces the new HD Graphics 2500 and 4000 cores, the latter of which is found on the majority of the first processors. It supports DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.1, and features a built-in AVC encoder for hardware video encoding and transcoding. Plus, for the first time it can access the processor’s L3 cache to boost performance.
We also need a new 7 Series chipset to control the Ivy Bridge CPUs. The HM75, HM76, HM77 and UM77 chipsets cover laptops, with the desktop split between the mainstream H77, the enthusiast Z75 and Z77, and the business B75. Motherboards are already widely available, with two more enterprise chipsets due in June.
There are no physical changes to the existing LGA 1155 socket, so Sandy Bridge processors will work in Series 7 motherboards. It may also be possible to plug an Ivy Bridge CPU into some recent Sandy Bridge motherboards with the right firmware updates, but that’s down to manufacturers.

Four integrated USB 3 ports come as standard on every chipset bar the mainstream HM75, and Intel has implemented support for Thunderbolt. Note, however, it will be up to manufacturers to add their own controller and hardware to complete the picture. The 7 Series also ups the display pipes to support three screens, but the catch is that two of them must connect via DisplayPort. For now it’s more relevant for new laptops, whose screens commonly connect internally via DisplayPort; the two external displays can therefore use one DisplayPort and HDMI, D-SUB or DVI.
Ivy Bridge brings a few other platform benefits. There’s a handful of new Centrino Wi-Fi adapters, complete with Bluetooth 4 support. Ultrabooks will reportedly resume from hibernation in less than seven seconds, and can poll email servers and the like without fully waking. They’ll also get access to Intel’s Anti-Theft Technology to remotely disable lost hardware, and any vPro systems will benefit from enhanced Identity Protection Technology, masking password login from keyloggers.

We built a test rig out of Intel’s reference DZ77GA-70K Extreme Series motherboard, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a Plextor SSD. We tested a Core i5-3570K against the old i5-2500K and AMD’s top-end Bulldozer chip, but the real face-off is between the top-end Core i7-3770K and the price-equivalent i7-2700K Sandy Bridge chip.
In our Real World Benchmarks the gap wasn’t huge, but it was a gap nonetheless. The overall scores of 1.06 versus 1.02 show a 4% increase on average, but the true margin varied from test to test: with intensive multitasking involving Photoshop and Sony Vegas, the gap never topped 3%; in basic Windows tasks it varied between 2.5% and 5%; and in our video rendering test it topped out at just below 9%. It’s an improvement over Sandy Bridge, but nothing earth-shattering.

The i7-3770K overclocked to a similar level as its predecessor, running stably with the maximum Turbo frequency upped from 3.9GHz to 4.4GHz using the tiny stock cooler. That added 5-10% on top of its standard scores.
The new GPU produced more interesting benchmarks. Intel’s Quick Sync Video hardware-acceleration technology has been present since Sandy Bridge, but the increased power of the HD Graphics 4000 chip was evident in our media tests. We transcoded a batch of 23 clips from 1080p AVCHD to iPad-quality MPEG4, and the i7-3770K cut 16% off the time taken by the old i7-2700K. When converting a single 720p MPEG4 clip to YouTube’s 720p 3Mbits/sec format, the Ivy Bridge GPU shaved off 19%.
We’re not convinced many people will build a desktop for gaming and not install a discrete graphics card, but the HD Graphics 4000 makes a decent fist of Crysis. At 1,366 x 768 and Low quality it averaged an easily playable 48fps, up 3fps from the i7-2700K; at 1,600 x 900 and Medium quality its 24fps average was 7fps faster than last year’s model, and not far off playable. It’s worth pointing out, however, that although it’s an improvement it’s still behind the GPU in AMD’s top-end Fusion chip.

Where the whole package excels is power efficiency. We hooked up a power meter to our test rig and measured the load with a Sandy Bridge i7-2700K: it drew 37W when idle and 132W when we stress-tested the CPU. With the Ivy Bridge i7-3770K inserted in its place the idle figure fell to 35W, and under load it drew only 104W, a reduction of more than 21% despite the increased performance.

The verdict

Intel’s tick-tock upgrade schedule makes such launches oddly predictable. We knew Sandy Bridge was going to be a big leap due to its new architecture, and it was. Likewise, we fully expected Ivy Bridge to be a smaller leap – its 22nm architecture really lays the groundwork for next year’s Haswell processors.
Although we wouldn’t rush to upgrade a recent PC, if you’re building from scratch, Ivy Bridge effortlessly becomes the processor family of choice. But the desktop isn’t its main focus. We haven’t tested the mobile chips yet, but it isn’t hard to see that the triple-whammy of greater speed, improved graphics and lower power consumption plays perfectly to the needs of Ultrabooks, and that’s precisely where Intel hopes it will make an impact. We’ll find out next month, but the signs are promising indeed.

Author: David Bayon

Posted in: 3rd Generation Intel Core, core, Core i5, Core i7, i5, i7, Intel, Intel Ivy Bridge review, review