Editor Note: Intel or GIGABYTE did not sanction this preview in any way. We are posting this well ahead of launch since some other well-known tech sites have already covered Ivy Bridge performance and the CPU is readily available and for sale right now.

Introduction

The Ivy Bridge launch has got off to a bit of a shaky start with the dates changing a lot over the last few weeks. If you really start to dig around, though, you'll probably find yourself quickly discovering that the whole Ivy Bridge platform seems to be fairly ready.

We've been seeing a fair bit of testing on the new crop of Ivy Bridge CPUs, more specifically the i7 3770k chip which at launch is going to be similar to the i7 2600k. Today we're looking at the Core i5 based 3570k which falls in line with the i5 2500k from the Sandy Bridge platform. There is a good chance you haven't seen any performance numbers on this 3570K chip until today.

Outside of all the CPUs being shown we've been seeing motherboards previewed and tested for weeks now. It really leaves us wondering why we are not seeing Ivy Bridge shown off in all its glory.

It seems to be due to stock more than anything else. While there's plenty of stock to hit the retail channel, the system integrated (SI) channel can't be as heavily populated. With the SI segment being huge for Intel it's important to keep all those guys happy and that's coming at the cost of the official Ivy Bridge launch being pushed back.

With the official launch of Ivy Bridge still being a little over a month away we don't want offer the i5 3570k as a normal full review because we could see a little change from a motherboard point of view over the coming month. We doubt it, but it's possible, so for that reason we're keeping this as a preview.

The only difference between this preview, though, and the launch review will be slightly less information in form of the technical side of things and no official score. We'll leave that for next month.