Urgent!Need Advice..SB or IB

Are you planning to try for an extreme overclock (as high of a speed as you can get)? Yes then go with the 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processors like the Intel Core i5-2500K for gaming. However if you are looking to get a reasonable overclock that may perform as well as a higher than go with a 3rd generation Intel Core processor like the Intel Core i5-3570K.


Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

Quite frankly for gaming you will notice little gain from overclocking, so the modest OCs you can (easily) get from IB should be quite sufficient for the next few years, 5 is a quite a long time between upgrades though.

IB and SB probably max out at about the same performance if you are a dedicated OCer.

SB is only better if it is cheaper IMO.

get ivy bridge. it runs slightly faster clock for clock. the thermal problem is non-exsistent at stock clocks. the only advantage of a sandy bridge is to show off with your really high clocks. most ivy bridge chips will overclock to 4.5ghz with good cooling.

in the end get ivy bridge with z77 chipset

No im not the kind of guy who will push my CPU to get a 5.5Ghz I'm only going to OC it 4.2/4.5 Ghz

get ivy bridge, you get better features if you use it with a z77 mobo.

It depends on the game. Benchmarks have show that Skyrim benefits from a faster CPU so if you compared a Core i5 running at 3.7GHz to another running at 4.7GHz, the one running at 4.7GHz will give better performance. On the other hand, a game like Crysis 2 demonstrated at whether the CPU was running at 2.5GHz or 4.5GHz the difference in performance was very slight.