General Performance

The general performance of the Core i5-3470 is nothing too unusual. We know from our original Ivy Bridge review that the advantage over Sandy Bridge is typically in the single digits. In other words, if Sandy Bridge was a good upgrade for your current system, Ivy Bridge won't change things. Idle power doesn't really improve over Sandy Bridge, but load power is a bit better.

Compared to the 3770K, you will lose out on heavily threaded performance due to the lack of Hyper Threading. But for many client workloads, including gaming, you can expect the 3470 to perform quite similarly to the 3770K.

SYSMark 2012 - Overall

x264 HD Benchmark - 1st pass - v3.03

x264 HD Benchmark - 2nd pass - v3.03

7-zip Benchmark

AES-128 Performance - TrueCrypt 7.1 Benchmark

Metro 2033 Frontline Benchmark - 1024 x 768 - DX11 High Quality

Metro 2033 Frontline Benchmark - 1920 x 1200 - DX11 High Quality

DiRT 3 - Aspen Benchmark - 1024 x 768 Low Quality

DiRT 3 - Aspen Benchmark - 1920 x 1200 High Quality

Crysis Warhead Assault Benchmark - 1680 x 1050 Mainstream DX10 64-bit

Power Consumption Comparison
Intel DZ77GA-70K Idle Load (x264 2nd pass)
Intel Core i7-3770K 60.9W 121.2W
Intel Core i5-3470 54.4W 96.6W
Intel Core i5-3470 @ 4GHz 54.4W 110.1W
Intel HD 2500: Compute, Synthetics & Power Final Words
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  • etamin - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    I just glossed through the charts (will read article tomorrow), but I noticed there are no Nehalems in the comparisons. It would be nice if both a Bloomfield and a Gulftown were thrown in. If Phenom IIs are still there, Nehalem shouldn't be THAT outdated right? Anyways, I'm sure the article is great. Thanks for your hard work and I look forward to reading this at work tomorrow :)
  • SK8TRBOI - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    I agree with etamin - if Phenom is in there, a great Intel benchmark cpu would be the Nehalem i7-920 D0 OC'd to 3.6Ghz - I'd wager a significant percentage of Anand's readers (myself included!) still have this technological wonder in our everyday rigs. The i7-920 would be a good 'reference' for us all when evaluating/comparing performance.
    Thanks, and awesome article, as always!
  • CeriseCogburn - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    It's always "best" here to forget about other Intel and nVidia - as if they suddenly don't exist anymore - it makes amd appear to shine.
    Happens all the time. Every time.
    I suppose it's amd's evil control - or the yearly two week island vacation (research for reviewers of course)
  • LancerVI - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    Throw me into the list that agrees.

    Still running a i7 920 C0. the Nehalems being in the chart would've been nice.
  • jordanclock - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    That's what Bench is for.
  • HanzNFranzen - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    I have to agree as well. I have an i7 920 C0 and often wonder how it stacks up today against Ivy Bridge. I'm thinking that holding off for Haswell is a safe bet even though I have the upgrade itch! It's been 3 years, which is great to have gotten this much milage out of my current system, but I wanna BUILD SOMETHING!!
  • CeriseCogburn - Monday, June 11, 2012 - link

    It's whole video card tier of frame rate difference in games, plus you have sata 6 and usb 3 to think about not to mention pci-e 3.0 to be ready for when needed.

    Buy your stuff and sell your old parts to keep it worth it.
  • jwcalla - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    I'm guessing the stock idle power consumption number is with EIST disabled?

    I've been waiting for some of these lower-powered IVB chips to come out to build a NAS. Was thinking a Core i3 (if they ever get around to releasing it), or maybe the lowest Xeon. Though at this point I might just bite the bullet and wait for 64-bit ARM... or go with a Cortex-A15 maybe.
  • ShieTar - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    If a Cortex-A15 would give you enough computing power, you should also be happy with a Pentium or even a Celeron. The i3 is already rather overkill for a simple NAS.

    I have a fileserver with Windows Server Home running on a Pentium G620, and it has absolutely no problem to push 120 MB/s over a GBit Ethernet switch from a RAID-0 pack of HDDs while running µtorrent, Thunderbird, Miranda and Firefox on the side. Power consumption of the complete system is around 40-50W in idle, and I havn't even shopped for specifically low-power components but used a lot of leftovers.
  • BSMonitor - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link

    Yeah, the CPU is just 1 part of the power consumption puzzle.. And since in "file sharing" mode, it will almost always be in a low power/idle state... An ARM CPU would show little improvement..

    But if you ever offloaded any kind of work to that box, you'd have wasted your money with an ARM box, as no ARM processor will ever match real task performance of any of the x86 processors.

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