15-20% improvement is too optimistic. You're looking at improvement that happened from Nehalem to Sandy Bridge. Even a die shrinked Nehalem, Westmere didn't have a 15-20% improvement over Nehalem.

It is normal practice that you wouldn't want your products to compete with each other. That is why you wouldn't see a SB Core i3 21xxK as it is definitely going to have a negative impact on the sales of Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K. Now the current race is not so much about raw performance but reasonable amount of performance or similar amount of performance but with less power. The mobile market currently is way larger than the desktop market.

BCLK overclocking return with Ivy Bridge
Now overclocking becomes interesting again instead of the mundane increase multiplier and voltage that comes with Sandy Bridge.

There is no 100% guarantee that the current H67/P67/Z68 motherboards will support IB even though IB will use the same LGA1155 like SB. Save yourself the trouble and just get SB for what it is and if you're lucky we'll know if SB motherboards will support IB in a few months time. Most probably you are not going to see much improvement from SB to IB as the IGP gets more improvement than the CPU, so if you're using discrete GPU then the CPU performance increase is minimal.

Intel launches the Core i7-2700K, reduces pricing on some CPUs

A short term gain for those who wants to buy those 3 models but the day that AMD goes down, those - will become + instead and it is not the positive kind of news that you want to hear.

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This post has been edited by dma0991: Oct 25 2011, 04:59 PM

Haha, my bad. Repost at LGA2011 thread.

Stock 4GHz maybe not but turbo 4GHz is definitely a possibility.

If the rumors are correct that IB will be in March, then it would only be Q1-2012 which is about 4 months away. Not a long time considering that one might be displeased with what they have (SB) when IB comes out. The mentality of if it is new it must be good kicks in to full gear and compulsive spending happens.

i3 2100 + HT will help a quite a bit in games. i5 2xxx with 4 physical cores would be better but the i7 26xx + HT has negligible difference in a low threaded application even in games.

That is the idea behind it as it is supposed to be like Nvidia Optimus. You could check more on Lucid Virtu but some motherboards from Gigabyte does not support it even though it is a Z68 chipset.

Launch dates of Ivy Bridge processors

Yes, only K series processor and mobile processors come with HD3000. Since you're using a P67 motherboard you cannot use it.

Yes.

If you're referring to the idle speed than BCLK then 1.6GHz is definitely normal because when your computer is not stressed, it has to idle to save power. Throttling your CPU to 4.4GHz all the time will not improve your performance in any way and puts unnecessary stress on your CPU and waste electricity. If IE lags then it is probably IE's fault. Try using other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome to compare.

Intel Ivy Bridge SKU range

How is that a bad thing? IB still has better performance/watt compared to SB.

I've mentioned already in the past that there will not be a 4GHz IB even if it possible to do so. The sub 4GHz frequency is due to the fact that more performance is not IB's aim. Intel's aim is to have better performance/watt and better IGP, both of which benefits the mobile end and has very little significance to the desktop end. It is rumored that most IB should be able to go 5GHz. This is 500MHz more than the 4.5GHz that majority of users will be able to attain easily with SB. If Intel were to increase the base frequency, then it will not look as though it has better overclocking headroom compared to SB.

TDP has quite a little bit of effect even on desktop. Remember when BD came out and the TDP and power consumption was very high? Nobody is going to close one eye and say that power consumption doesn't matter even on the desktop end. I know that Intel could release a 95W TDP IB with increased base frequency to match a 95W TDP SB which in turn would make the IB have higher performance like an overclocked SB but this would cannibalize the sales of the higher end SB-E when a factory overclocked IB can achieve the same results as a stock Core i7 3930K and Core i7 3960X in most tests. We'll probably see the standard TDP reset to 95W when Haswell comes out and take advantage of the TDP that IB did not utilize.

Things could also go backwards with overclocking potential decreased with a shrinking manufacturing process but that is not 100% confirmed. With Intel increasing their maximum 57x multiplier on SB to 63x multiplier on IB, it is possible to assume that a huge majority of IB chips will be able to overclock till 5GHz.

Performance comparison of Core i7 3770 relative to Core i7 2600. Core i7 3770 has an extra 100MHz Turbo Boost advantage over the Core i7 2600 hence the slight performance increase. Take it with a grain of salt though.

They are almost identical with little variations in IGP frequency depending on the CPU model that you bought.