Intel
Intel Core i7-3770
Ivy Bridge's locked flagship: four cores, eight threads, 8 MB of L3 and HD 4000 graphics inside 77 W. It is the fastest chip worth putting in an LGA1155 board you already own, and in 2026 a used-market purchase only.
Pros
- Eight threads still cover light content work — encoding, compiling, many browser tabs — better than any four-thread part here
- 3.9 GHz maximum turbo, the highest of any LGA1155 non-K chip
- HD Graphics 4000 with 16 EUs is roughly twice the iGPU of the HD 2500 parts and a decent Quick Sync encoder
- PCIe 3.0 x16 and 8 MB L3, so it does not bottleneck a mid-range modern GPU as badly as its age suggests
- Runs in cheap H61/B75/H77 boards — no Z-series premium needed since it is locked anyway
Cons
- Locked multiplier: the i7-3770K is the only way to overclock on this socket
- DDR3-1600 and 32 GB ceiling, with no AVX2 support (that arrives with Haswell)
- Four cores is thin for 2026 gaming — expect frametime stutter even with a fast GPU
- No official Windows 11 support, and 6/7-series boards rarely boot NVMe without a modded BIOS
Below average
Computed from specs & benchmarks via our public methodology.
Full specifications
Everything we track for the Intel Core i7-3770
General
- Announced
- 2012
- Socket
- LGA1155
- Process
- 22 nm
- Base TDP
- 77 W
- Unlocked multiplier
- No
- Cooler included
- Yes
Cores & Clocks
- Cores
- 4
- Performance cores
- 4
- Efficiency cores
- 0
- Threads
- 8
- Base clock
- 3.4 GHz
- Boost clock
- 3.9 GHz
- L2 cache
- 1 MB
- L3 cache
- 8 MB
Integrated GPU
- iGPU
- Intel HD Graphics 4000
- iGPU clock
- 1,150 MHz
Memory
- Memory support
- DDR3-1600
- Max memory
- 32 GB
- Memory channels
- 2
Platform
- PCIe version
- 3
- CPU PCIe lanes
- 16
Benchmarks
- Geekbench 6 (single)
- 1,100
- Geekbench 6 (multi)
- 3,550
- Cinebench R23 (single)
- 980
- Cinebench R23 (multi)
- 4,100
- PassMark
- 7,000
Quick answers
Is the Intel Core i7-3770 good in 2026?
The Intel Core i7-3770 earns an Inno Score of 23.7/100 (“Below average”) based on its specs and benchmark results. Ivy Bridge's locked flagship: four cores, eight threads, 8 MB of L3 and HD 4000 graphics inside 77 W. It is the fastest chip worth putting in an LGA1155 board you already own, and in 2026 a used-market purchase only.
What are the key specs of the Intel Core i7-3770?
Cores: 4 · Threads: 8 · Boost clock: 3.9 GHz · Socket: LGA1155
What are the closest alternatives to the Intel Core i7-3770?
Its closest rivals on InnoReviews are Intel Core i5-4690K, Intel Core i5-6500, Intel Core i3-8100 — open the comparison pages for a spec-by-spec breakdown.