Intel Core i7 4770K and Z87 chipset review [Guru3D.com]

How is it good? Your chip's performance is not affected by anything new, if it works well for your purposes you don't need an upgrade for any reason other than to grow your e-penis. That's the wrong mentality to have, Haswell not being a step forward is a huge blow to CPU advancement.

I actually need more CPU power, specifically dual threaded performance. So an increase to performance per clock or overall OC capability was something I needed. If I decide to bend over for Intel I'll have to de-lid the chip, that's not something I've ever done before and Intel being Intel might use super glue from hell this time around.

 

From what I hear, the same thermal issues are apparent on the retail version as well. But just be careful deliding the CPU. you have all that crap on the PCB now.

 

So much for all the prognosticators saying "Wait for Haswell, it'll OC better than IB"

 

Considering Haswell was entirely built around power savings, and NOTHING else, it was natural to assume it would be a cooler chip and therefore have a higher OC potential.

 

whether it turned out to be a flop or the best thing since Hooters chicken wings, it was sound advice at the time.

 

I don't think it was, it always made me cringe when people who wanted to upgrade were told to wait.

 

I meant at the time. If I knew then what I know now, I would of told those people they'd be crazy for waiting lol.

 

Power consumption was the focus since performance couldn't really be improved. We have hit a major wall that has rolled on since Nehalem.

I believe it's the first time some very high-end rigs here have an almost 4.5 years old chip and they're still doing pretty fine.

 

I was just about to ask. I suppose it's not known yet whether or not it is soldered? I'd have to guess it's not with those sh!t temps. I don't know what to do anymore :3eyes: I almost feel like a SSD and a kepler will hold me until we get something decent.

 

This will be great for those who are going to build an entirely new system, bad for those who are looking for an upgrade. It's really in AMD's favour, since AMD is looking to increase their IPC and overall performance with Steamroller with a newly redesigned cache and a new scheduler architecture. Basically the entire frontend was tweaked which should help AMD close the gap. AMD's had a strong multithreading performance, it was only really lacking in single threaded applications and keeping power usage low.

Unfortunately, AMD is not posed to refresh its FX line until early 2014 (based on recent roadmap) so upgraders on the AMD side won't be happy either. AMD is focusing more on its APU side.

For Intel fans, I guess they'll look forward to IVB-E instead which should give about 5-15% in terms of performance as well compared to SNB-E.

As noted, both AMD and Intel are focused on the low power, mainstream market with little love for the desktop market. This may be how it is going forward unfortunately. It's both good and bad news for me personally. Good news is that I might be able to squeeze more life out of my desktop. Bad news is that this means that processor advancement may stall in terms of trying to achieve more raw power.

Personally, I'm due for a rebuild in 2017, so let's see how this all pans out. Hopefully by then there's enough reason to rebuild my rig (unless my brother needs an upgrade before that lol).

deltatux

 

I don´t think i recall such performance stagnation on desktop cpus since i started to be a lover of hardware. The market and competition is a fair explanation to some degree but i can´t help but feel that we the enthusiasts were given the middle finger.

 

Intel gave that middle finger last year when they announced that BGA is the wave of the future and that socketed CPUs will go the way of the dinosaur.

deltatux

 

Intel is seeing a leadership change as well, a lot can change.

 

I thought BGA was going to be only for the low end stuff and laptops?

 

On the latest Intel Roadmaps, Broadwell is actually listed as 'Haswell refresh', due Q2 next year along with the Z97/H97 chipsets. Since Broadwell is labelled as 'Haswell refresh', it is reasonable to assume that it will have similar performance. It's true that they are expected to go to 14nm process, but remember the 'gain' that was had from going from 32nm (Sandy Bridge) to 22nm (Ivy Bridge)?

AMD 'Steamroller' is due next year and at worst will be on 28nm (although it has been suggested that due to new alliances it may be on 20nm). This will represent more of a performance harmonisation between AMD and Intel. For both AMD and Intel the next big move is in 2015, when Intel moves to 'Skylake' and mainstream DDR4 use, and AMD does the same thing with 'Excavator'. Excavator will probably be the first 'high end' AMD processor to incorporate a graphics core. Basically the direction of AMD is that you will have your typical APU families as you do now, and a high end APU family for performance users. It will also likely to have fully heterogeneous system architecture with high level parallelism with the traditional CPU cores and the GPU.

 

No they basically meant that desktops are dead and they're focusing on BGA solutions like tablets and laptops. Obviously that's not what we want but the market trend seem to suggest that. I do hope Intel reverses this and realize that there are many of us who will never let go of our desktops. (People have been singing the death of the desktop for more than a decade and it's still here).

Ivy Bridge was more of a gain in performance than Haswell has been lol. This isn't really a tock, it seems like Intel is doing 3 ticks in a row with Ivy Bridge to Broadwell lol. There's not much of a tock here.

As for AMD, 28nm isn't bad tbh, AMD is moving to a half-node to better align with their other products and also help reduce costs in process shrinks. Half nodes normally cost less in the shrinking than full nodes. I think it's a great step forward that AMD is taking to do half nodes than full nodes. Plus, most of GlobalFoundries' and TSMC customers use half nodes anyways. Almost all non-x86 SoCs use half-nodes anyways. AMD's taking a different route than Intel, esp with their HSA and hUMA architecture where they are going to take the GPGPU route for FP calculations while keeping a smaller x86-capable FPU. It's one of the driving reasons why AMD went with a smaller FPU for Bulldozer and one of the reasons why they created hUMA. Intel, on the other hand rather keep it traditional and have a wide and powerful FPU instead.

deltatux

 

From what I have read on various forums, the general concensus is Intel is sticking with that type of thermal solution. After reading this review and seeing the temps at load, affirms just about everyone's speculation..

 

It doesn't benefit Intel for not using thermal paste instead of solder. Solder costs more and they don't want people to be able to overclock the chips so much that people won't buy their LGA2011 processors.

deltatux

 

As I said in a previous post, the only change they probably made was moving to a stronger glue.

That said, the processor height has been reduces fractionally, but most CPU coolers should still be able to apply pressure in the optimal range.

 

That and they don't want chips going over 5GHz so people have more of a need to upgrade to the next generation.

I've managed to hang on with a chip I've had since 2010 that runs at a measly 4GHz. Imagine if the IPC was improved notably each generation and the current chips OC'd to 5.5GHz, no one would actually need to upgrade such a chip for years.