"The Intel 'Ivy Bridge' system is clearly a strong platform. When we looked at the performance with our initial article it was clearly faster than the previous generation was. At the same time, there are clearly some... not sure if I would say flaws, but definitely some concerns for enthusiasts. It seems that the days of hitting 5.0GHz on air cooling are gone, at least for this generation of Intel LGA1155 processors. What isn't clear at this point, is if we are strictly being limited by temperature, or if the new 22nm die just isn't as overclocking friendly as it's predecessor.
Today we weren't able to bring our Intel Core i7 3770K 'Ivy Bridge' processor beyond 4.7GHz with complete stability. This is a little disappointing, but not the end of the world and we are still getting a massive overclock for 'free' so to speak. We also have to keep in mind that processor frequency isn't quite as important as it once was. A short time ago we took a look at performance scaling across several of the Intel 'Sandy Bridge' Processors and our AMD Radeon HD 7950. There truly wasn't as much of a difference as we had expected to see. That isn't saying that there is no difference, but if you're PC's primary concern is gaming, 100-300MHz isn't going to make or break the experience. Especially if you consider that when it comes to clock to clock performance, the Intel Core i7 3770K 'Ivy Bridge' processor is faster than the Intel Core i7 'Sandy Bridge' platform. We saw this in our launch article at default speeds with the Intel Core i7 2700K and again today with our Intel Core i7 2600K clocked at 4.7GHz!"
