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4930K benchys early look. Conclusion.. Meh.

SimonMaltby said:
Also remember that there is a 100MHz increase in boosted speed between the two benchmarks so its not much increase at all from Ivy over Sandy.

As has been said earlier, its all about how it overclocks and handles memory.
Unless this is much better than the 3930K I can't see the point in upgrading a 3930K to a 4930K.

Personally I only have a 3820 which was always a stop gap while waiting for a 4930K and if the 4930K is not much better than a 3930K, well maybe I can pick up a cheaper 3930K when Ivy-E launches :)
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+1.
 
My take on it is this.
The performance difference between SB-e and IB-e can be easily predicted, compare a SB and IVY 4 core and scale up.

What people are hoping for is easier overclocking, less heat and strain on the VRM's.
The better memory controller will be very welcome also.

Also better PCI e3 compatibility.
Although on some existing X79 boards the bridge chips used to split the lanes may still cause issues.

Currently if you use a 39xx chip for heavy duty tasks such as encoding or number crunching the high power consumption and thermal output are serious issues.
The heat from the CPU can be dealt with by using large air coolers or water but the strain on the VRM's cant.
Even on high end boards you can induce throttling with high AVX loads.

Note: Used in a high end gaming rig the CPU demands are peaky and not sustained so you can run higher clocks and wont normally run into the high thermal output/VRM throttling issues.

So in a nutshell my hopes are these.

1: Lower power consumption.(lower thermal output and VRM stress)
2: Ability to sustain higher clocks under load than SB-e.
3: That with the improved memory controller faster and/or larger amounts of RAM can be used more easily.
4: Better PCI-e compatibility (No need to mess around to enable PCI-e 3 signalling speeds as we do now.)
5: Small IPC increase.
 
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This is essentially identical performance at the same price as the outgoing SB-E, which is an absolute rip-off given that the 4930 and 4960 are native 6 core chips rather than 8 core chips, and massively smaller and cheaper to produce.

Reduction in power-draw is great, but you'd expect it 2 years later,32->22nm and the die having 2 less cores.

Wait and see for Haswell-E unless prices of IB-E fall significantly.
 
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Jokester said:
But that's the thing, you don't have to pay for that 5% more. You're still effectively as fast as you can get, yet will now last effectively 2 (or even more) CPU generation iterations, whilst when there's massive gains every year you're more likely to have to pay out every time a new architecture was released to keep up.
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I know where you are coming from but for some people, having a faster system is more important than being 'top of the pops'.

In other words, I'd rather have a 6ghz system when top of the range is 7ghz, than a 4.8ghz system when top of the range is 5ghz (speeds given as illustrations of effective performance - assume performance is the same clock for clock).

If we take your argument to extremes, effectively the best thing would be for technology to never progress, and we are all running the same system for year after year, never upgrading because we all have the best you can buy. A 486 would still be top of the range if Pentium never came out, yet a 486 would also be too slow to let us do certain things and I'd rather have an i7.

Sure, software will progress with hardware and if hardware doesn't advance then the requirement for faster hardware is arguably diminished (i.e. software requirements scale with hardware availability). But progress is a good thing. If cpu speeds increased 50% overnight I'd view that as a positive, I could then choose if I wanted to upgrade or not (just as you say you can choose if you pay for the extra 5%, you could choose if you pay for the extra 50% - by the time it becomes a necessity to have that extra speed, prices will likely have fallen anyway).

Even in the days when hardware was progressing at a rate of knots, I wasn't buying new kit all the time, maybe every 18-24 months or so and usually on a revision rather than jumping straight to every new architecture immediately (P2 Mendocino, P3 Coppermine, P4 Northwood etc rather than earlier iterations). For me progress was a good thing and I didn't feel like I needed to jump on every 20% boost that was available or whatever.
 
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HangTime said:
But progress is a good thing. If cpu speeds increased 50% overnight I'd view that as a positive, I could then choose if I wanted to upgrade or not (just as you say you can choose if you pay for the extra 5%, you could choose if you pay for the extra 50% - by the time it becomes a necessity to have that extra speed, prices will likely have fallen anyway).
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Early in 2001 I spent ~£220-240 on a 1GHz Pentium III Coppermine, less than a year later the 2GHz Pentium 4 Northwood and the comparable Athlon XP were on the scene with twice the performance. The following year Intel hit 3GHz, AMD matched the performance and my <2 year old CPU was ready for the dustbin.

I saw that happen so many times over the years that I for one am not against hardware slowing down now software is advancing slower. I would much rather spend £4xx on a 4930K knowing it will still be good in 5 years time* than change my board/CPU every 12-24 months.

*based on the i7 9xx being 5 years old and still more than fine for the average gamer.
 
ubersonic said:
*based on the i7 9xx being 5 years old and still more than fine for the average gamer.
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+1

I gave my mate a brand new Rampage II Extreme I never got round to using and he has just finished building a X58 system with it. He spent £90 on a secondhand CPU and put a H100i cooler on it, he is now having fun overclocking it and reaching CPU clockspeeds that would embarrass the odd 4770k owner or two.
 
ubersonic said:
*based on the i7 9xx being 5 years old and still more than fine for the average gamer.
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+1 > i7 920:4.2ghz/X58 still going strong here. I was going to upgrade to Haswell or X79 later this year, but just upgraded the GPU from a Toxic 6950/70 DB to a Asus 670 4gb.

Now got my sights on a ? build who knows, this build has been great value for money. :)
 
The Bottom Line

The general feeling I come away from the Ivy Bridge-E is that it is a good processor, but nothing stellar when compared to the Sandy Bridge-E predecessor. Is it better? Yes. It is a whole lot better? No. Should you ditch your Sandy Bridge-E system for a shiny new Ivy Bridge-E? No. If you happen to be coming from a sub-4GHz LGA 1366 "Gulftown" system, the Ivy Bridge-E is going to be a big step up. However if you are lucky enough to still be sporting a ~5GHz Gulftown processor, you are likely better off sticking with it.
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Oh well, at least Haswell -E is shaping up nicely, a proper upgrade.. 8 cores and DDR4. I'm starting to save my pennies now lol. 4770K is ideal until then ..

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013..._core_i74960x_ipc_ocing_review/6#.UiDLVD8_JEE
 
Boomstick777 said:
Oh well, at least Haswell -E is shaping up nicely, a proper upgrade.. 8 cores and DDR4. I'm starting to save my pennies now lol. 4770K is ideal until then ..

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013..._core_i74960x_ipc_ocing_review/6#.UiDLVD8_JEE
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We've already seen some noticeable frame rate improvement in games with higher than 1600MHz speed memory with the Haswell CPUs due to the improved memory controller, I wonder what kind of performance difference would it make, if Haswell-E got a even better memory controller, and combine with the use of DDR4 memory...:p
 
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