Originally posted by mendieta
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I own a Sandybridge-e rig, I built it last year. It was before the Titan so it has a pair of AMD 7970's. It was built for gaming and making Video's for Youtube.
I used Windows for gaming and recording, then Linux for editing and rendering. Given the state of AMD drivers I do not get the benefit of the second card when in Linux.
The step from Sandy to Ivy is a relatively small one. There is around a 10+% bump in per clock performance. The memory controller is better, allowing RAM speeds higher than 2133MHz. There are more PCI lanes and now PEI-e 3 is supported. There is a significant drop in power usage. The downside is that they do not overclock as well and get very hot very quickly much like the regular, non -e Ivybridge.
The Sandy CPU's overclock to between 4.5 to 4.9 if you have a good one. The Ivy CPU's that have been tested max out at 4.5 if you are lucky and they will be chuffing hot. So there is very little benefit in upgrading, well at least from the enthusiast's point of view. If you were to be building a workstation/enthusiast rig today then yea, run an Ivybridge but if you have a Sandybridge already there is very little reason to upgrade. We need to wait for the next generation or maybe the one after that. I think we need to see a chipset change before we see real change on this platform otherwise it's going to be babysteps with incremental improvements.
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