iBUYPOWER Erebus GT Review: Ivy Bridge and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 in SLI
by Dustin Sklavos on April 27, 2012 2:00 AM ESTApplication and Futuremark Performance
What we're essentially trying to gauge here is how an Ivy Bridge processor with reduced overclocking headroom compares to a Sandy Bridge chip with lower IPC and higher clocks. In the process, we can also see how both of them compare to chips with lower IPC and extra cores (specifically Gulftown and Sandy Bridge-E).
Out of the gate the PCMarks are both responding well, but I suspect that may also be due to the Intel SSD employed in this Erebus GT. It may still be using SandForce's controller, but it's Intel's firmware. Whatever the case, for general use the new Erebus GT screams through PCMarks, delivering a 7% increase in PCMark 7 and 12% in Vantage compared to the previous model.
Looking at the CPU-dependent benchmarks may or may not be troubling, depending on your perspective. From the looks of things, Ivy Bridge's improved IPC is almost entirely mitigated by its reduced overclocking headroom. The IVB Erebus GT is a scant 2% faster in most of our CPU tests, with the SNB variant actually taking a slight 1% lead in Cinebench 11.5. What's interesting is that on the CPU side, even overclocking and increased IPC still doesn't bridge the gap between Intel's quad cores and their hexacores; the i7-990X still runs wild in any task that can take advantage of the extra cores.
What can we take away from the 3DMark results? 3DMark06 is always going to be CPU-limited (and probably should be deprecated at this point), but in 3DMark Vantage's older workload we see a pair of GTX 680s essentially equaling the performance of two GTX 590s. That's two current generation GPUs hitting stride with four of last generation's. When you get to 3DMark11, the GTX 680s just run away with it. This is important, remember it, because it's going to come up again when we get to power consumption.
64 Comments
View All Comments
hjalti8 - Sunday, April 29, 2012 - link
According to these pics :http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/IvyB...
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/intel/sand...
it seems that the graphics processor on the ivy bridge takes up alot more die(%), so the difference, when you only consider the cores, should be even greater.
Because the surface area of the cores is so tiny the heat dissipation decreases resulting in worse temperatures.
762m964 - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
Expansion Slots 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x16 or dual x8) *21 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode, black) *3
3 x PCIe 2.0 x1
Sli @ 8 x 8 , imagine another motherboard with sli @ 16 x 16 !!!
kyleb2112 - Saturday, May 5, 2012 - link
Question marks on the price? Seriously? Not much point in coming to this site if you start leaving out the most important data points.Drittz121 - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Just do yourself a favor. STAY AWAY from this company. Yes they look good. But when it breaks and it WILL. All they do is give you the run around. They have had my system for over 2 months trying to fix the garbage they sell. Worse company out there for support. DONT BUY