With the imminent release of Ivy Bridge from Intel, some of you, like myself, might just be considering building a new pc. So what do we know:
Ivy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 22 nm die shrink of the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture based on tri-gate ("3D") transistors. Ivy Bridge processors will be backwards-compatible with the Sandy Bridge platform, but might require a firmware update (vendor specific).
It uses the same socket 1155, as with Sandy Bridge, so if you have a motherboard with socket 1155, you might just be able to get a firmware upgrade from your MB manufacturer, and be compatible with Ivy B. However, since you will be using an older chipset on the MB, you will never be using the full potensial of the Ivy B CPU.
Chipset wise, they will be brining our Z77, H77, Z75, Q77, Q75 and B75. These Chipsets will use the latest PCI Epress 3.0, USB 3.0, and the now standard SATA 3 (6GB/s).
What impovements does Ivy Bridge have over Sandy Bridge?
Ivy Bridge feature improvements over Sandy Bridge include:
Tri-gate transistor technology (less than 50% power consumption at the same performance level as 2-D planar transistors)
PCI Express 3.0 support
Max CPU multiplier of 63 (57 for Sandy Bridge)
RAM support up to 2800MT/s in 200 MHz increments
Intel HD Graphics with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1 support
The built-in GPU is believed to have up to 16 execution units (EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's maximum of 12
A new random number generator and the RdRand instruction codenamed Bull Mountain
Intel Quick Sync Video
DDR3L low voltage for mobile processors.
Multiple 4K video playback
The general concent out there, is that if you have a Sandy Bridge pc, it's not a huge improvement to go Ivy B, but if you're on an older platform, then it will be well worth your trouble! It will use less power, run a little cooler, and be slightly better performance wise than Sandy B. The GPU on the Intel chip is the new HD4000, but most gamers will look past that as an upgrade, since we will go for a discrete GPU anyway.
I like Gigabyte MB's myself (and getting them at almost cost also helps), and they have a range of MB released a week or 2 ago.
What's nice about the Gigabyte motherboards though, is that it will, with the help of software, sense if you need heavy graphics processing, and if you don't, it will use the Intel HD4000 GPU for normal tasks such as Windows stuff, word, internet surfing. It will then put the dedicated GPU (say your new GTX680) into a low power state (all dedicated GPU's eat power, even when at idle on normal day to day non gaming related work).
Once you start a game for eg, the software will bring the GTX680 to life. So this translates to power saving, and thus money saving, since you have the best of both worlds. How sweet is that? It has been around for a while I read, but that's still pretty cool for me!
Next Gaming PC build
