smokebelch

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May 17, 2012
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I'll be honest i feel like im asking a silly question so please hold back the flames and the trolls

What is an Ivy Bridge CPU? I see it mentioned but then i google it and get alot of talk about ivy bridge things but no examples of what they are?

everyone keeps saying theyre 'the one' so at a guess is the i5 2500k and the i7 etc an ivy bridge?

be gentle
 

bwrlane

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Don't worry, there are no flames or trolls here. This is a grown up forum that's ready to help newbies and experts alike.

Ivy Bridge is simply a code name for an Intel architecture. Other examples are Sandy Bridge, Nehalem, Arrandale, Clarkdale, Conroe and a great many others.

The code name is never part of Intel's public name for a CPU but just a convenient way of designating a particular CPU family.

Ivy Bridge is Intel's current architecture. It supersedes Sandy Bridge, offering minor improvements in performance and power consumption. In fact the improvements are so minor that there's no point in getting IB if you already have SB. Intel's next family, which will offer more radical improvements will be called Haswell.

Ivy Bridge CPUs come in many shapes and forms. Intel's marketing department wants us to think of them in their convenient, oversimplified categories with i7 as high end, i5 as mainstream and i3 as entry. The reality is never so simple. To get the ideal CPU for your purposes you need to know what applications you want to use, and then decide whether you want a dual core or a quad core, whether you want a hyperthreaded quad core or not, whether you want to overclock and how much cache you want. It's a complicated picture but there are a few general rules.

- dual core i3 and i5s are fine for general use
- quad core i5s are best for gaming, particularly the K versions, because these allow unlimited overclocking
- quad core i7s are just as good as i5s (but no better) for gaming but are more expensive. For your extra money you're getting a larger cache and hyperthreading, which are useful for advanced applications that want a lot of CPU power like video editing, modelling and simulations
- hex core i7s are the high end and are overkill for gaming, but handy if you do a lot of work with advanced applications that need a lot of CPU power. At present, these exist only in Sandy Bridge flavours as Intel has not yet released the IB variant.

i5 2500k is a sandy bridge CPU. For many, it is the ultimate gaming CPU because it's quite cheap, just as good as an i7 for gaming and is very overclockable. It has been superseded by the IB i5 3570K. In i7 terms, the SB i7 2700K has recently been superseded by the IB i7 3770K.
 

smokebelch

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May 17, 2012
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thanks for the replys especially bwrlane, amazing. Actually learned alot and since i bought the i5 2500k recently I am alot more confident in my decision as it is for gaming.

With regards to overclocking. does it differ by motherboard as I will probably look in to it with this new cpu. or are there any good forums to learn from as to how to go about it?
 

smokebelch

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May 17, 2012
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thanks for the replys especially bwrlane, amazing. Actually learned alot and since i bought the i5 2500k recently I am alot more confident in my decision as it is for gaming.

With regards to overclocking. does it differ by motherboard as I will probably look in to it with this new cpu. or are there any good forums to learn from as to how to go about it?
 
Overclocking differs based on the CPU and motherboard.

Just because someone else can OC their i5-2500k to 5.0GHz does not mean everyone will be able to. There is basically a single production line for all Core i5 CPUs. The one with the fewest defects (i.e. highest quality) are designated as the i5-2500k, while the ones with the most defects (but still functional) are designated as the i5-2300. Core i5 CPU with too many defects from the manufacturing process are trashed.

Same with motherboards. Even with two motherboards of the same make and model, one may have better overclocking abilities than others because the various chips in one may have fewer defects than the other.

Certain brands design better motherboards for overclocking than other brands, and the overclocking potential varies from model to model.
 



Trying not to sound stupid or unlearned but the intergrated GPU HD3000 in the 2500K isn't only an overclocked HD2000 is it ?

PS my friend is playing diablo 3 on a HD3000 I could not believe it.
 
you als with intel and online reviews posted here an on other forums. intel does what called a tick-tock release cycle with there cpu. other then having pci 3.0 for video cands and usb 3.0 built into the chip and the new tri gate inside. the ib right now dont over clock as well as a sb. a lot of people finding the run hotter right now. what also fund to look at is the intel slides for the cpu core logic over the years and amd too. a few years back it was how fast can your cpu go race. now it how much work can your core cpu do in one clock cycle.
 


HD 2000 has 6 execution units while HD 3000 has 12.
 

willzzz

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Pfff that's nothing, I am playing D3 on a HD733.
 



but what was said above is that lower binned 2xxxK w/ were being used as I5 23/24xx. So taking what you said is the HD 2000 the same as the 3000 with some deactivated parts ? or was he just mistaken ?
 


He wasn't talking about HD Graphics there anyway, just CPU binning. But no, HD 2000 isn't a lower binned version of HD 3000. ALL HD 2000 Graphics CPU's only have 6 execution units and never had 12 to begin with (no deactivation of the extra 6, since they were never there to be deactivated).