I'm looking at getting an i7-3770 to replace my i5-2500K in my aged 1155 LGA based PC. Clock speeds are quite similar, and Ivy Bridge was a fairly small improvement over Sandy Bridge microarchitecturally.
The main boost I'd get is 4 additional (logical) cores from Hyperthreading.
Will Visual Studio build faster and be snappier with those 4 hyperthreading cores? Or would I be better off just saving my money?
I pulled the trigger on the i7-3770, and it knocked the initial build time and deployment to the Android emulator of my MAUI app down from 4m55s to 3m30s. That's a speed increase of 40%, for a time reduction to 71% of the previous time.
So yes, Visual Studio build time does benefit from Hyperthreading. :) And whatever other benefits IvyBridge brings over Sandybridge, plus a small bump in clock speed, but most of the benefit can be attributed to Hyperthreading.
(Gotta set the max number of parallel project builds under Tools>Projects and Solutions>Build And Run to how many cores you want to use, in my case, 8)