i5-3570k or i7-3770k?

[BarbaricSoul]

Originally Posted by qubit

That's really strange. I remember reading in reviews that turbo needs to be enabled for this, so the behaviour I see is consistent with that and is a design feature of the CPU. You can underclock it with turbo off though. I've only ever overclocked it through the bios, too.

I have no idea why yours should be different.

no idea, but here's a pic of my bios. as you can see, turbo is disabled

[cookiemonster]

Hi FreedomEclipse, If its going to happen it will happen to me so i like a little bit of insurance on my side and at £15.00 to me it's worth it.

[FreedomEclipse]

Originally Posted by cookiemonster

Hi FreedomEclipse, If its going to happen it will happen to me so i like a little bit of insurance on my side and at £15.00 to me it's worth it.

thats your call obviously, but its honestly a waste of time (and money)

When you buy the CPU, It comes with 1 years shop warranty & 3 years manufacturers warranty. THATS your 'Performance Tuning Protection Plan' and it doesnt cost anything extra.

Nothing can protect you against bad luck but the risk of damaging hardware is significantly less if you know what you are doing.

Key things like:

- A case with good airflow/ventilation.
- A good aftermarket CPU cooler.
- Knowing the 'safety' limits of your hardware

And most Importantly of all:

- Knowing what you are doing

these things can significantly decrease the risk.

Ive been overclocking since 2001 and I have never fried any CPUs. almost 98% of my parts were well looked after and healthy enough to be sold on and almost all of my parts are still working and doing their job perfectly fine apart from the lady who decided to bathe the PC in hot coffee.

£15 might not be a lot of money. But with a little reading, asking a few questions here n there and lurking around some. You will gain enough knowledge and regret parting with that £15 because you could have bought yourself a nice medium rare 14oz steak dinner and a few beers to go with.


Unless the CPU is out of warranty and you want to overclock it then fair enough, by all means go ahead and purchase the protection plan.

[cadaveca]

Originally Posted by FreedomEclipse

Unless the CPU is out of warranty and you want to overclock it then fair enough, by all means go ahead and purchase the protection plan.

What the tuning plan offers is not really more, you are right, except one part. What it does offer that the normal warranty does not is "NO QUESTIONS ASKED" replacement.


You'll also note for the first time ever, noone knows what the safe max voltage for these chips are. IVB has no known public limit for 24/7 clocking.



I can tell you've never had to warranty a CPU, since you don't place any value on that "NO QUESTIONS ASKED", so that good, maybe it's not for you.

If you are like me, and are pushing things every day, trying to get more, erven though it might seem within reason, then yes, the value is there.


Plus, OC voids warranty. If you RMA after OC, then you're kinda a low-life in my books, especially when this costs so little.

[FreedomEclipse]

Originally Posted by cadaveca

I can tell you've never had to warranty a CPU, since you don't place any value on that "NO QUESTIONS ASKED", so that good, maybe it's not for you.

Never - I'm not that wreckless neither do I push my hardware to breaking point by trying to find out how many volts I can pump through it.

Ive always been careful with my hardware especially when it comes to any sort of tweaking. So no i dont place any value in the 'no questions asked' warranty policy.

I dont like faffing around with lengthy RMA processes and procedures unless I really have to. Ive had my fair share of RMA'ing graphic cards and the odd hard drive here and there though.

But its getting to a point where I dont even bother making any serious effort to OC my graphics cards. Slap an extra 20-30mhz on the clocks here and there, stress test it a little then jump in a game and see how it does.


as for 24/7 voltage for IB, I simply just googled the recommended voltage and gleamed info from loads of other forums. I recently did my first IB build for a friend of mine and his is doing 4.6Ghz at something like 1.37v. Only had enough to put it through one pass of Prime for 12hrs but it passed it and chewed through IBT without any problems and has been working flawlessly with any game my friend throws at it, from BF3 to ARMA II, Crysis 2 and whatever he plays.

I keep watch on the temps and i keep it under 70'c as much as I can.

[qubit]

Has anyone been able to overclock these CPUs without turning on turbo mode, like BarbaricSoul in the picture above? I'm talking about multiplier overclocking, because the CPU ignores any value higher than the default if turbo is turned off. This is what I see.

[cadaveca]

Originally Posted by FreedomEclipse

Never - I'm not that wreckless neither do I push my hardware to breaking point by trying to find out how many volts I can pump through it.

Ive always been careful with my hardware especially when it comes to any sort of tweaking. So no i dont place any value in the 'no questions asked' warranty policy.

I dont like faffing around with lengthy RMA processes and procedures unless I really have to. Ive had my fair share of RMA'ing graphic cards and the odd hard drive here and there though.

But its getting to a point where I dont even bother making any serious effort to OC my graphics cards. Slap an extra 20-30mhz on the clocks here and there, stress test it a little then jump in a game and see how it does.


as for 24/7 voltage for IB, I simply just googled the recommended voltage and gleamed info from loads of other forums. I recently did my first IB build for a friend of mine and his is doing 4.6Ghz at something like 1.37v. Only had enough to put it through one pass of Prime for 12hrs but it passed it and chewed through IBT without any problems and has been working flawlessly with any game my friend throws at it, from BF3 to ARMA II, Crysis 2 and whatever he plays.

I keep watch on the temps and i keep it under 70'c as much as I can.

I was speaking in generalizations, not to you specifically. I mean really, at this point, there are so many protections built into the hardware, it really is pretty hard to hurt one of these chips, adn that's why Intel is willing to offer that warranty in the first place. Now, if you're gonna puish it and go really cold, then sure, you might break things. If you pop the lid, you void the wartranty, obviously, so I see that choice of TIM for IVB an intentional one made to save your CPU.


However, at teh same time, when you overvolt, you're gonna shorten the life of the chip, so why not get the warranty? You can transfer it to a new user when you sell the chip, too...Intel really has taken this to the next level when it comes to this warranty.

Originally Posted by qubit

Has anyone been able to overclock these CPUs without turning on turbo mode, like BarbaricSoul in the picture above? I'm talking about multiplier overclocking, because the CPU ignores any value higher than the default if turbo is turned off. This is what I see.

Yes, it can work, and it might be board-BIOS dependant. I know SB does, I haven't bothered to try with IVB, and SB-E, you need Turbo for OC with some 3960X chips, and Intel will replace retail chips that do that, I heard.

[qubit]

From what I'm seeing here (thanks cad, especially) this warranty at a very reasonable £15 is quite a good deal for those looking for that extra peace of mind, so I don't think cookiemonster has made a mistake in going for it.

I didn't bother with it, but then I just don't care. Just gives me an excuse to buy the better one if I break it.

[cookiemonster]

Hi there thanks for all the advice, but to me it just means i spent £15 more to buy the processor, maybe i could have got it cheaper from somewhere else but to me peace of mind is a lot when accidents happen. I will give you all a shout when i decide to overclock.

[mediasorcerer]

Interesting reading, i cant clock my 3570k as high as my old 2500k would go, seems to top out around 4.6, 4.8 but that's enough anyway for me.

[Sasqui]

So back to turbo and overclock!

Sounds like that's board dependent, if it needs to be enabled to overclock. From what I understand, turbo will save some power and keep things a lot cooler in idle mode.

Wo with the 3770k, stock speeds are 3.5Ghz (idle) & 3.9Ghz (turbo). How does that work? Does the chip regulate the multiplier increase depending on the load? Does it do it core-for-core?

[btarunr]

I would pick an i5-3570K for any application over the i7-3770K. There's too little in the 3770K that warrants the price gap between the two chips.

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by btarunr

I would pick an i5-3570K for any application over the i7-3770K. There's too little in the 3770K that warrants the price gap between the two chips.

That was my thought too, though many opinions to the contrary

Price of 3570k is ~60% of the 3770k, performance (on average) of 3570K is about 80-90% of the 3770k. So the price point doesn't suck. Of course it's debatable, but the overclockability seems about the same.

[Tatty_One]

I suppose I suffer from over simplification....... if you are regularily using apps that can use and perform significantly better with more than 4 cores/threads, then go 3770K, if not, the cheaper 3570 is the answer.

About 3 years ago after using my i7 920 for some months I decided to disable HT to see what impact it would have in terms of temps and reduced voltage requirements at high overclocks, I played around for a couple of weeks tweaking settings and benching, I realised about 4 months later when I updated the Bios that I had forgotten to re-enable HT..... did not see any difference, but all I do is surf, a bit of light gaming and a fair bit of Office 2010 work.

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by Tatty_One

I suppose I suffer from over simplification....... if you are regularily using apps that can use and perform significantly better with more than 4 cores/threads, then go 3770K, if not, the cheaper 3570 is the answer.

About 3 years ago after using my i7 920 for some months I decided to disable HT to see what impact it would have in terms of temps and reduced voltage requirements at high overclocks, I played around for a couple of weeks tweaking settings and benching, I realised about 4 months later when I updated the Bios that I had forgotten to re-enable HT..... did not see any difference, but all I do is surf, a bit of light gaming and a fair bit of Office 2010 work.

4 cores vs. 8 virtual... and from what I recall seeing in past performance tests, it does improve things if their being utilized, but each one is slight slower than a single core that is not broken into two.

I suspect that the 8MB vs 6MB cache is probably the biggest bottleneck.

Hell, I'm running a 2x Core2 rigs right now and even wondering why I'm upgrading

[Sir B. Fannybottom]

Originally Posted by Sasqui

4 cores vs. 8 virtual... and from what I recall seeing in past performance tests, it does improve things if their being utilized, but each one is slight slower than a single core that is not broken into two.

I suspect that the 8MB vs 6MB cache is probably the biggest bottleneck.

Hell, I'm running a 2x Core2 rigs right now and even wondering why I'm upgrading

If you're wondering why you're upgrading why are you then? haha Save your money and upgrade in the next generation then.

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by TacoTown

If you're wondering why you're upgrading why are you then? haha Save your money and upgrade in the next generation then.

I've skipped generations of CPUs, from the 920, 2600 and now Ivy Bridge. My plan was always to jump to Ivy Bridge when it arrived and here it is.

Do I need to? Probably not. Do I want to? Yes.

[Tatty_One]

Between the 2 the greater cache will of course help, I was in a dilemma wheter I should upgrade/sidegrade/downgrade/anyGrade from my i7 920 to a 3570K, some have said that with the loss of HT AND cache size I would take a fair hit in performance, where actually the 3570k improves most CPU/Encode type benches by a fair bit, add to that the overclocking headroom on a typical 3570K in comparision to an i7 920 and it's good enough for me.

[Sasqui]

Originally Posted by Tatty_One

Between the 2 the greater cache will of course help, I was in a dilemma wheter I should upgrade/sidegrade/downgrade/anyGrade from my i7 920 to a 3570K, some have said that with the loss of HT AND cache size I would take a fair hit in performance, where actually the 3570k improves most CPU/Encode type benches by a fair bit, add to that the overclocking headroom on a typical 3570K in comparision to an i7 920 and it's good enough for me.

I haven't looked up any comparisons between the 920 and the 3570k or 3770k.

I just know in my case, the memory bandwidth alone with an IMC will be a big jump from a Core2 duo.

To bad the deal on the 3750k I listed before is expired, so now I'm looking at about $220 for a 3570k or $330 for a 3770k.