Interlopers.net Forum - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

So there's currently a little sale going on at Newegg. I've been slowly purchasing components for my new PC and am torn between which CPU I should get here. On sale, the Sandy Bridge is $279.99, which is $10 cheaper than the Ivy Bridge (which I originally picked out).

Sandy Bridge: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819115229

Ivy Bridge: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116502

The Sandy Bridge has better base speed (3.6 ghz) than the Ivy Bridge (3.4 ghz), but the Ivy Bridge has a better turbo boost (4.9 ghz) than the Sandy Bridge (4.8 ghz). The Sandy Bridge also has 10mb of L3 cache while the Ivy Bridge only has 8mb of L3 cache. And of course, Ivy Bridge is 22 nm and 77 watts, while the Sandy Bridge is 32 nm and 130 watts.

The Sandy Bridge uses LGA 2011, and the Ivy Bridge uses LGA 1155. I would have to pick out a new motherboard that supports LGA 2011 if I wanted the Sandy Bridge.


So basically, how important to gaming is L3 Cache (10 mb vs. 8 mb), the base operating frequency (3.6 ghz vs. 3.4 ghz), the manufacturing tech (22 nm vs. 32 nm), and the thermal design power (77 watts vs. 130 watts). These are the main differences between both processors that I've noticed when observing the specs on them. I don't know all the critical details about Ivy Bridge, just that it's supposed to be better.

The difference between Sandy and ivy bridge is more than just cache size and mhzes.... Comparing architecture size (nm) is like comparing car sizes to top speeds, and TDP is directly related to mhz and architecture size. So none of the properties you mention actually matter much.

To be honest the 3770 is better on all fronts. Its even cheaper because it contains heatsink and fan, which the other one doesn't. But i dont think the improvement is worth buying an entirely new mobo (an extra $100 or so). All in all thats for you to decide tho. Default the speed difference is about 5% or so, probably less.

/thread

zombie@computer wrote:The difference between Sandy and ivy bridge is more than just cache size and mhzes.... Comparing architecture size (nm) is like comparing car sizes to top speeds, and TDP is directly related to mhz and architecture size. So none of the properties you mention actually matter much.

To be honest the 3770 is better on all fronts. Its even cheaper because it contains heatsink and fan, which the other one doesn't. But i dont think the improvement is worth buying an entirely new mobo (an extra $100 or so). All in all thats for you to decide tho. Default the speed difference is about 5% or so, probably less.

Well I'm building an entirely new rig to begin with. I already have an LGA 1155 motherboard picked out (not purchased yet), but if I were to go with the Sandy Bridge, I would have to find an LGA 2011 board instead. That's all I was getting at. But thanks for the info. I'm not really well-versed in PC hardware so that's why I made this thread in the first place. I was leaning more towards the 3770 Ivy Bridge anyway.