Advice on Haswell upgrade

[george1979]

Hi,

I'm considering upgrading my CPU and mobo to an i7 4770. My trusty little i5 760 has served me very well but I'm doing more and more video editing work on the Adobe CS6 suite and I think its time to retire it for something with a bit more oomph. I've checked and my PSU is Haswell ready.

My first thought was the i7 4770k but considering the 4770 turbos up to 3.9GHz anyway I'm wondering if its really worth spending the extra cash just to be able to overclock it? Thinking that it may be more beneficial to put that cash into the motherboard.

Also can anyone recommend a good mobo? My main considerations are lots of sata ports and USB 3 ports but other than that I haven't really looked at motherboard options since I built my current system 3 years ago. Not bothered about SLI or crossfire. Had a quick look on Scan and the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H looks good but I can't see info about the number of sata ports anywhere.
I'd reckon about £130 max for the mobo (although obviously I'd rather pay as little as I can!)

Thanks

[Toobad]

Well after 6 days still nobody has an opinion so I'll stick my head above the parapet and risk taking the flack! Video editing software, along with photo editing/cataloguing software like Adobe Lightroom, just loves high clocks so my focus would be firmly on the unlocked 4770K chip. Luckily for you there is no longer a need to marry it to a pricey enthusiast mobo using a Z87 chipset since Asus released an updated UEFI bios which allows their B85 and H87 mobos to be overclocked.

http://www.asus.com/News/jLaOehAeS7oh3NYi

Have a look at the Asus H87-Pro which retails at around £87. It has 6 SATA III ports and 4 USB 3.0 ports on the rear I/O plate along with the option to hook up a further 2 from the mid-board 19-pin header. Asus mobos also have an onboard UASP controller which will speed up even further any externally connected USB 3.0 UASP compliant devices. They call it USB 3.0 Boost.

So the money saved on the cheaper mobo will subsidise the K chip but of course you will need a better than stock cooling solution if you haven't got one already. I run the Asus Z87-Pro mobo and the 4-way Optimisation built into the UEFI bios took my 4770K up to a stable 4.4GHz with a single mouse click. The bundled Fan Xpert 2 software manages to run my system as close to silent as you can get even at this overclock.

Just my £0.02 worth. Let the flaming commence

[george1979]

Utter rubbish! Lol just kidding - thanks for your reply.
I was thinking that haswell doesn't OC very well as most seem to run around 4.3-4.5Ghz unless I'm mistaken. Since the 4770 turbo's to 3.9Ghz the increase will be barely noticeable? Also I just read another thread today where CAT mentioned TSX isn't on the K chips - apparently this improves, or has the potential to improve, multithreaded performance, provided the software has been coded to take advantage.

I do like the sound of that USB 3 boost though so I'll take a look at the Asus boards although I'd want one with more than six sata ports if possible. As for cooling I have an H50 but its three years old now so I'll probably buy a new cooler.

[Bonebreaker777]

Not much else to say about this.
4770k will get you the furtherest but at a cost (money wise).
Most of Z87 boards have the 6xSATA and 6xUSB3.0 as standard I would say.
AsRock got USB Boost as well.
But one mouse click to 4.4Ghz is definitely worth it. Long as you have decent cooling (anything more that stock).

[Mister]

Depends how much you want to overclock. The old Sandybridge 2600k i7 is potentially faster than the Haswell 4770k i7 as it can reach much higher clocks (up to about 5ghz on water) and more than make up the difference. The reason for this is Intel used cheap thermal paste under the Integrated heat spreader for Ivybridge and Haswell, instead of Solder as on older CPUs. It can be "fixed", but you might loose the warranty.

[Bonebreaker777]

I think we already had this here.
Was discussed already the performance difference per clock between individual architectures and worked out between 5-10%.
If you take the TWO generation difference, you can end up with 10-20% performance difference per clock.
Assume a fix performance a i7 2600k produces at 5Ghz.
A i7 4770k should be able to produce that at 4-4.5Ghz.
Next time around a PC...

EDIT: Translated czech IT page.
There at the graph you can notice that i7 2600k performance percentages are the following: 87.2% in single threaded applications, 61.9% in multithreaded applications and 71.8% in average (against a Intel Xeon E5-2687W).
For a i7 4770k the numbers are the following: 97.3% in single threaded applications, 70.4% in multithreaded applications and 78.6% in average (against a Intel Xeon E5-2687W).
The difference will be 11.5% in single threaded applications, 13.7% in multithreaded applications and 9.5% in average (not taken into account the 2.9% speed difference between 3.4Ghz i7 2600k vs i7 4770k).

Just my input.

[george1979]

I was thinking the same thing. Not to mention the additional power required to run a 2600k at 5Ghz. There's also the additional features that have been added to later generations.

I reckon I'll go for the 4770. Better efficiency and having extra features available such as TSX are more important to me than squeezing an extra 500Mhz out of the chip.