 Welcome to my belated Ivy bridge coverage. So in front of me here I have a few different processors. Some of the processors that we've tested are represented by boxes here, some of them are not but I want to start with outlining the overall Ivy bridge line up. So we have everything from the lowly 3450. So this is a core i5, that's a dual core that has no K at the end so that means this is not an unlocked overclocking processor although you can still overclock it a little bit but very, very, very limited. It also has a 50 at the end of the part number and what that means is that it has HD 2500 graphics and that will be important for one of my other videos where I'm going to do an onboard graphics roundup where I compare the 2500, the 4000, the older last generation 3000 that was on Sandy bridge as well as AMD's 3870K APU that has their onboard Radeon graphics. So let's hold on, let's keep going though. So for the rest of the line up, so what all this means? i7 means you have hyperthreading, i5 means no hyperthreading, the 30 whatever seems to have some sort of indication in terms of the rank within the product stack. A 50 versus a 70 means 2500 versus Intel HD graphics 4000 which is significantly more powerful from our testing and then the K at the end means that you have an unlocked processor that can be easily overclocked and in this case the 3770K sample that we were working with was able to easily achieve 4.6 GHz and that's 24x7 stable. In fact that is the setting that we used for our max overclocking results. So you know what, I guess we might as well just go with, here I'm going to hide the IGP showdown. Actually, no I shouldn't. Yes, I'll hide these ones for now. There we go, so let's just go through this you guys. Let's do this as like a one take. So in terms of the tests that I ran, my timing was fairly limited. So with a single GTX 680 I ran most of this other stuff, so PCMark 7, Cinebench as well as using either quick sync or no quick sync to quickly convert a video using Arcsoft Media Encoder 7. So I took a 1 gig file and then I outputted it in an iPhone 4 compatible format and timed how long it took. So I'll do that as sort of round 2 through all of the tests. So PCMark 7 wise we can clearly see that the max overclocked 3770K, you know what, I'll turn these into graphs. Alright, so we're just going to do these one at a time. Here's PCMark 7, basically this doesn't benefit as much from multiple cores as you might expect. So our 8 core processor, the 8150 from AMD, as well as our 6 core processor, the 3930K, don't actually do that well. I mean the 3930K scores a little bit better than its Sandy Bridge brethren, remember this is Sandy Bridge E but the 8150 just, yeah it doesn't do that well in this test. You can see that it does however benefit from significantly higher core clock speed. So once we overclocked our 3770K to 4.6 GHz the score dramatically improved and we do get a slight boost from hyperthreading here. You can see however though with Sandy Bridge we were pretty much within margin of error on these two processors so yeah, all of this, take it with a bit of a grain of salt. Remember this is still a synthetic benchmark. Here's our Cinebench test, so you can see this was run in two different settings, single threaded as well as multi-threaded. So you can see the single threading runs according to increasing down the graph, so that's the order it's sort of set up in. However, the multi-threading is where some of these processors really differentiate from each other. So the 8150 gets pretty much destroyed in the single threaded test, falling to about half of the score of the 3770 with the max overclock on it. However, due to its 8 cores it does sort of make up some ground and falls pretty in between the 2500K and the 3570K which is appropriate given its price point. The new generation Ivy Bridge processors beat their last generation Sandy Bridge equivalents by about 10% so this is pretty much to be expected. And then you can see here that the Sandy Bridge core which is the same as on Sandy Bridge E, the 6 core 3930K, scores about the same in the single thread however just sort of stomps all over everything when it comes to multi-threading because this is 6 cores, 12 threads. You have to do some serious overclocking, that is about 4.6GHz on Ivy Bridge in order to get it to catch up to Sandy Bridge E in a multi-threaded test like the Cinebench test. For Battlefield 3 guys, remember this is a custom run through so the results might not have the same kind of consistency but I believe them to be real world accurate. So Battlefield 3 seems to care about multi-threading. You can see here our 3930K performs extremely well even running with the big dog in this test which is the 3770K at its maximum overclock. And remember a 3930K is good for at least a reasonable overclock to 4.0GHz as well so there is more performance to be squeezed out of it. Now unlike some CPU reviews I've gone with realistic settings, 1080p high details so that's why you're not seeing much difference in terms of the performance of these processors. Let's face it, they're all pretty close. Everything here uses Sandy Bridge, everything here uses Ivy Bridge and this is the lone AMD CPU in the test so you can see the FX8150 doesn't do that well but everything else is pretty close when it comes to the max FPS with the 3770K max OC winning and everything else here is pretty similar when it comes to the minimum FPS as well. Did I say max because I meant average? So the red bar is average and the blue bar is the minimum. So this is all sort of within margin of error and this is the one that's really lagging behind in this case. If you want to see those numbers a little bit better, there you go. Running with my usual Witcher 2 settings you can see again there's not much separation here in terms of performance with the exception of the 3930K which shows its prowess again with its multi-coreness as well as the 3770K being the clear winner again and the 8150 being the lesser performing part out of all of the parts in this particular test. I'm using, yeah my usual settings, I think I already said that. Now it should be noted that while I am using realistic settings for the games I'm using maybe a bit of an unrealistic configuration. These are dual 7970s overclocked at 1.075 GHz, 8 gigs of RAM, MSI Z77A GD65 board, I used an MSI EXA 79 something or other GD65 for LGA 2011 and then I used a Crosshair V formula for the AMD test bench. I'm using an SSD for my boot drive, Patriot Wildfire and that's pretty much it. Let's get into the Skyrim results. So Skyrim as you can see doesn't really like the 8150 very much and really benefits from better IPC and higher clock speeds as you can see here more than it benefits from multiple cores. So the clear winner in this guy is the 3770K due to its overall faster than the other stuffness. So guys actually I changed my mind about the quick sync and media encoder, media converter 7 results. I'm just going to do a general overview of what's special about Ivy Ridge and we're going to wrap this one up as just a performance overview. So Ivy Ridge in general, what's special? New 22nm manufacturing process, reasonable overclocking although it does get pretty toasty, you're going to want something like a Corsair H100 or an H80 to keep it pretty cool if you want to go over around 4.5GHz. Performance wise, yes it's better than Sandy Bridge, I don't have a Sandy Bridge box to represent here. It is better than FX, however FX has some pretty aggressive pricing going on and considering how many cores are included there's something to be said for that. And oh yeah, right, other stuff. Lucid Virtue MVP is supported on the similar time frame released Z77 chipset. You've also got support for overclocking, hyper threading, turbo boost as well as better onboard graphics. So the better onboard graphics not only affects if you're using onboard graphics but also affects if you are using media converter 7 and you're using the IGP in order to convert your media which is like way, I'm not going to spoil it, but it's way way faster than any other way of doing it. Especially with the new Ivy Bridge processors using the HD 4000 graphics. Virtue MVP basically is just a way to use the onboard graphics to improve performance in games, although in my experience it didn't make that much of a difference and the spotty consistency of the results of that particular technology made it not that appealing to me. The Z77 platform with an Ivy Bridge also supports PCI Express 3.0 which means your latest generation 7900 series, 7800 series and 600 series graphics cards are going to be able to really stretch their legs even if you're using a mainstream platform that only supports 8x 8x bandwidth. That is equivalent to PCIe 2.0 16x 16x. So thank you for checking out my belated Ivy Bridge overview and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Jibs for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.