We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, Gigabyte, MSI, Western Digital and Corsair.

Before we get into the performance side of things we need to quickly cover the overclocking side of things. Something we've experienced so far with our Ivy Bridge testing is that overclocking hasn't been the best mainly due to the high heat levels attained.

To date we've tested three 3770k processors and a single 3570k and when overclocking we found they had all hit over 100c and in some cases hit the 105c limit that was forcing them to throttle back in speed. Heading into the BIOS on our ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe we spent the time trying to find the sweet spot for our 3770k.

We ended up running at a 46x multiplier with the BCLK running at 99.77 which resulted in a final clock speed of 4.59GHz. This isn't the best overclock we've seen by any stretch of the indignation. Unfortunately we're continuing to see that the current crop of Ivy Bridge processors aren't overclocking as strong as the older Sandy Bridge counterpart.

None the less we'll see just what kind of performance we're able to get out of the Core i7 3770k against a number of other CPUs that are also tested and overclocked today.

Let's get started!