So, the first thing we've got to say is that we're still dealing with early versions of these CPUs. They're both early samples, they're both engineering samples and we're still five weeks away from the official launch of the Ivy Bridge platform on a whole. So, like everything that we've done related to the Ivy Bridge platform, we've kept it as a pure preview. We're not giving any kind of verdict yet on the CPUs.

From a pure MHz perspective, it's not that hard to find yourself a little disappointed with what you're seeing. But really there's two important pieces of information that have to be remembered. The first is that our 2600k is a really good overclocker. I actually bought this particular 2600k because every ES sample we got was only hitting around the 4.9GHz mark. It also carried with it a really strong memory controller, which is great for memory overclocking.

The second is that so many times we saw that MHz isn't everything. At times our i7 3770k comes in 400MHz slower than our 2600k and is able to outperform it. Not all the time, but when it came to real-world situations, it puts up a tough fight. Quite often when it falls behind, it doesn't look like a chip that is running 400MHz slower.

On a whole overclocking is a little bit of a mixed bag, though. The good news is I think as we see later versions of silicon we'll see some better numbers in term of overall heat and hopefully higher clocks. These new CPUs seem to have no issue dealing with some massive voltage, it's just at the moment the heat is quite high for them.