Early Ivy Bridge Sample Tested

A user on the forums at coolaler has published results of some testing carried out using an early Ivy Bridge sample. Running with a stock speed of 2.0GHz and a Turbo Boost speed of 2.4GHz, this chip was shown running at 2.4GHz with 4 GB of memory at ram timings of 6-9-6-24. Although this chip is running at relatively low core speeds, it is early silicon and does not represent expected clock speeds.

A number of tests were performed at 2.0 GHz and 2.6GHz. A user at Bit-tech performed some tests with as SB-E (i7-3960X) underclocked to 2 GHz to compare results. The i7-3960X had hyperthreading enabled and all cores were active (although he did reduce the number of threads used to 8 in one of the tests!).

A single thread benchmark, using SuperPI, showed that both chips have identical performance. Using the Fritz Chess Benchmark, the 3960X (using 8 threads) only scored 20% better than the 4 threaded Ivy Bridge chip. Testing with Cinebench, the 3960X (using all 12 threads) scored 5.68 points, compared to 3.35 on the Ivy Bridge.

The tests so far are promising, and it will be nice to see what refinements we get as we get closer to the release date. This chip is believed to be stepping B2, although that is unconfirmed.