I do a lot of HD video encoding and ever since building my old PC with an ASUS P6T Deluxe and unlocked i7 920 D0 revision cpu, I fully realized how powerful the quad core i7's were and how much quicker they were at processing these video files when multi-core applications demand that.
I needed something back last December for working on the road so I got an ivy bridge i7 laptop with the 2630QM. I didn't notice much difference despite the generational gap. I assume the raw speed of the OC'd 920 helped compensate for the less efficient architecture.
With that in mind, you can imagine my hesitation to drop hundreds of dollars on a new motherboard and CPU but since the upgrade came out of necessity instead of simply wanting to upgrade, I decided to go with what I think to be the equivalent of the 920 back in the day. It seems like all the motherboard reviews and even video card review test systems all use the 4770k so that also helped my decision.
the installation went smooth and I have the 4770k mounted in an ASUS Gryphon motherboard in a Corsair Obsidian 650D case with the XSPC Rasa 750 RS240 water cooling kit with a pair of Noctua NF-F12 fans mounted to the radiator for silent and efficient cooling.
After an evening of overclocking and stress testing with AIDA64, I've got it running great @ 4.4 ghz. I couldn't notice any difference between 4.4 and an unstable 4.6. It would boot into windows @ 4.6 but blue screens about 3 or 4 minutes into stress testing (despite temps never exceeding 85*C). I backed it down to 4.4 as it is stable without any voltage increase at that speed and just left it there.
The combination of jumping forward several generations of CPU's and the fact that my Crucial SSD is now running at it's full 6gbps vs 3 in the old bloomfield motherboard has yielded massive performance gains in everything. Regular opening of programs, booting into windows, shutting down, is faster, encoding HD video files is faster and the frame rate in games is also much higher.
TL;DR
So in conclusion, if you're still one of those guys clinging tight to his original i7 system, Haswell will amaze you. It will give you dramatic performance increases in every aspect of the use of the computer. I can't speak for the other intel platforms that came after bloomfield.
If you don't do heavy number crunching work that really benefits from the multi-threading capabilities of the i7, the i5 4670k should dish out 95% of the performance capabilities in other tasks (like gaming, etc).
I rank the 4770k @ 4 stars. I subtract 1 star because it's a much steeper price of entry vs the aforementioned 4670k. Is hyperthreading worth an extra $100? For most people, no, hence the 4670k being a much better CPU for the money. For the majority of CPU builders, it's a non issue but for people who do the tasks that I do, there is simply no other choice but to fork over another hundred bucks. I know I wasn't FORCED to get the 4770k but if I had settled for less, I would have constantly been wondering what could have been.
I spent a few more bucks on the 920 back in April of 2009 and I believe it helped future-proof me longer than an i5 at the time would have so spending a bit more this time around makes me optimistic that this will last me several more years before needing to upgrade.
| Processor | 3.4 GHz intel_xeon |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 32 GB |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Intel HD |
