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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JarredWalton - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Based on previous pricing by iBUYPOWER, I'd guess they'll end up charging around $3000. However, we can't really print that since it's just a guess. :-pawall13 - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Would be nice to see noise measurements for this water cooled setup. Seems to me that it would be an important consideration for a potential buyer compared to building their own (more likely air-cooled) setup.ewood - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Normally I would overlook this little slip up but it is the third time I have heard an anandtech article refer to Lynnfield as a tick when in fact it is a tock. It did not use a new fab process and it did employ a new architecture. Lynnfield was a tock. Get it right, you're a hardware site.JarredWalton - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Sorry, you're right. I screwed up and looked at Lynnfield. The article has been adjusted, but in my above comment, if you just replace "Lynnfield" with "Clarkdale" not a whole lot changes. Clarkdale was very underwhelming, and Gulftown is highly specialized. I never actually ran either one other than seeing a hex-core Gulftown stuffed into a Clevo X7200. :-\The problem is that Intel made comparisons very messy with Westmere. On the desktop we had Clarkdale (dual-core plus IGP) and Gulftown (hex-core and no IGP). On laptops we had Arrandale (basically just mobile Clarkdale). There were no mainstream quad-core Westmere parts, so you had mainstream dual-core or high-end hex-core and never the twain shall meet.
Anyway, don't feel too superior for catching the error -- try writing about technology and code names for a few years and I can pretty much guarantee you'll make some mistakes. Heck, just read the tech junky posts in hardware forums and even the best people make mistakes.
JarredWalton - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
And yes, I know that Clarkdale's IGP was actually 45nm on package.web2dot0 - Friday, April 27, 2012 - link
Isn't there something fundamentally wrong with people using 1200W of power to play computer games? Considering that there is a power shortage all over California, it's pretty abusive to hoar all that juice when there are better ways to spent it.Not trying to be judgemental or anything, but there should be regulation on energy consumption for computers that are not work-related. No different than emission standards for cars and such.
UltimateKitchenUtensil - Saturday, April 28, 2012 - link
1200 W is just the power supply's capacity. If the components draw less than that (in this case, much less than that), the supply will only give them what they need. And it will do it very efficiently, since the AX-1200 is 80+ Gold.In this case, even though the power supply is rated 1200 W, the system, under load, only consumes 471 W of power. Some of it is wasted, but over 80% is used by the system.
web2dot0 - Saturday, April 28, 2012 - link
I'm sure having a 80+ Gold PSU is great, but you are still using alot of power. I'm guessing if you plan to have a SLI config, you are going to OC the CPU, and everything else.A regular PC consumes < 150W, this PC is using 471W.
I'm also guessing that people who buys these bad boys aren't exactly casual gamers, so these PCs will be under load way more often than an average PC.
Just saying ....
buzznut - Saturday, April 28, 2012 - link
Its funny, AMD comes out with a product that equals its previous efforts and its a major fail. Why do we find it so easy to forgive Intel?"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."
And doesn't overclock as well. Aren't you glad you ran out and bought that Z77 board?
Obviously it has a little to do with power and efficiency. At least BD is much more capable with respect to overclocking. I am very underwhelmed.
Which is what confuses me. Ivy Bridge has been overhyped as much as bulldozer was. People really should be asking, "what happened?"
Dustin Sklavos - Saturday, April 28, 2012 - link
Ivy Bridge is still directly superior to Sandy Bridge in almost every way BUT overclocking headroom. I'm underwhelmed by Ivy Bridge, but it's much more efficient in terms of power consumption than Sandy Bridge. Before overclocking, you get slightly better performance for much less power.Bulldozer was in many ways a step BACK from Deneb and Thuban. The FX-8150 should always have at least equalled the Phenom II X6 1100T, but in certain cases it was actually slower.
That, and everyone wanted and needed Bulldozer to do well for AMD's sake, the sake of the market, the sake of the community. Nobody was really looking at Sandy Bridge and going "boy, if Intel could make this thing faster we'd all be better off."