iBUYPOWER Erebus GT Review: Ivy Bridge and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 in SLI
by Dustin Sklavos on April 27, 2012 2:00 AM ESTConclusion: Still a Solid Buy
My conclusions from the previous review of iBUYPOWER's Erebus GT are going to be echoed here: the system continues to be a solid value and worthy of enthusiast attention. What's also worth mentioning is that this review unit exhibited none of the issues I dealt with in the last one that merited the response from iBUYPOWER's Ricky Lee: it was solid from start to finish. Boutique systems tend to be a bit inflated in terms of price, but the Erebus GT is actually a good deal for an enthusiast looking for a liquid-cooled system but unwilling to actually wrestle with assembling one. Liquid-cooling the CPU is, at least in this reviewer's opinion, generally overrated unless you're really stressing it, but the video cards benefit from it in a major way.
I think the big story is actually Ivy Bridge and what it means to enthusiasts. Pretty much everyone else here has weighed in on it over the past few days, but as an enthusiast I'm a bit lukewarm to the i7-3770K. I feel like a lot of us were hoping for either a bigger performance improvement or better overclocking headroom due to the new process, but what we have instead is a chip that, when pushed to its conventional limits, is essentially still only the equal of its predecessor in terms of performance. It's difficult not to feel at least a little bit underwhelmed in that respect, but hopefully as Intel's 22nm process matures and new steppings become available, that overclocking headroom will improve and Ivy Bridge can fully supplant Sandy Bridge in the hearts and minds of enthusiasts. Such is the nature of Intel's "ticks", I suppose—Penryn and Westmere didn't exactly set the world on fire with improved performance.
On the other hand, where Ivy Bridge and Kepler do offer a substantial improvement over Sandy Bridge and Fermi is in performance-per-watt. This Erebus GT is hands down the most efficient gaming desktop we've ever tested, providing essentially the best quad-core performance and absolute best gaming performance we've ever seen while drawing less than 500 watts from the wall. When you're used to seeing gaming systems regularly draw far more than that, it's a big deal, and the best part is that idle power consumption is still entirely reasonable. This is one place where NVIDIA's and Intel's engineers can really be proud of themselves; Ivy Bridge may ultimately not provide enthusiasts any tangible performance advantage, but the power consumption advantage is undeniable.
In terms of gaming, the iBUYPOWER Erebus GT with Intel Core i7-3770K and pair of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680s in SLI is the fastest system we've ever tested. CPU performance is essentially competitive, but tasks that benefit from additional cores are going to continue to prefer Gulftown and Sandy Bridge-E. Those are, I think, corner cases with benefits that for the majority of users won't outweigh the added expense and power consumption. The result here is that iBUYPOWER has produced a system with exceptional component choices, excellent power characteristics, and solid thermals. The Erebus GT as a chassis and cooling solution continues to be exceptional, and now it benefits from advances made by Intel and NVIDIA in recent months. That's worthy of a recommendation.
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Kimbernator - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
1200w for 2 680s? that's probably not wasteful.Never buy prebuilt gaming computers, building is cheaper and you'll get better performance.
Sabresiberian - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Well, Nvidia's recommendations would put the PSU at 750W for 2 680s in SLI.You need some headroom if you plan to overclock the video cards, but I don't see that requiring another 450W. An 850W PSU should be more than plenty, unless you want room for installing 2 more cards, or 1 more card and plenty of room to OC the 3.
You did read the test results showing max draw to be less than 500W, right?
It's all good to say "never buy pre-built" when you personally have the time and inclination, and I more or less agree with the sentiment, but rigs like this one from iBUYPOWER are very much known quantities - everything in it is name-brand, and the unit itself has been tested here at Anandtech favorably. I wouldn't fault anyone for buying this rig over building his own.
;)
DigitalWolf - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
"We've heard that Ivy Bridge runs hotter than Sandy Bridge does, and I can confirm those findings by comparing the thermal readings from our Sandy Bridge-based Erebus GT against our Ivy Bridge-based Erebus GT."The images that you have to compare the two systems... show the 2700k system with a maximum vcore of 1.06v and the 3770k with a maximum of 1.36v.
I would expect the system with .3 higher vcore to run "hotter" even if they were the same chip...
Nickel020 - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
The same screenshot show that +12V is at a maximum of 7.03V... Don't put too much faith into software readings, especially with very hardware there are often errors. Given that the current value is 1.10V during idle, that 1.36V is likely just a freak reading, the VCore will not vary that much.Nickel020 - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
*with very new hardware there are often errors.leonzio666 - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Where are Metro 2033, Mafia II, Witcher II with ubersampling and Crysis or Starcraft II MP benchmarks ??? No one, and I mean absolutely no one in their right mind would buy such a beast only to play the games tested.imaheadcase - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
No one buys a system for just the games YOU listed to. Games are subject to the user, the games they used are POPULAR games so they went with them.Starcraft MP does not stress a GPU/CPU much. Metro 2033 is not a game many play, Mafia 2 not many play, etc.
jonbanh - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
hmm, i would say starcraft 2 is pretty POPULAR. and if you say it doesnt stress the CPU/GPU enough, well you also have portal 2 up there hitting almost 300 fps. i would've liked to see metro 2033 also just because it's been one of the most demanding games so far. as well as crysis 2i always figured when systems are given to sites for reviews, the manufacturer provides "guidelines" for what benchmarks they want or dont want shown
Sabresiberian - Saturday, April 28, 2012 - link
Oh yeah, popularity is always the top reason a game should be included in a benchmark suite.Dustin should have included "Angry Birds".
;)
Tchamber - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
When do you expect to get the chance to compare 7970s in CF to the 680s in SLI?