Haswell-E Reviews

[exar333]

4.4ghz sound's very attainable and is what I was hoping to hit on the 8C part. Nice product...

 

[moonbogg]

As a gamer, I won't feel bad about hanging onto my 3930k @ 4.3.

 

[FatherMurphy]

For all us i5-2500k users... looking at the AT Bench, in most multi-threaded software, the 5820k is about twice as fast. Not so in games, though. That's just at stock, though. If I could get a 5820k at 4.3 Ghz like my 2500k, I'd be good to go....

Time to do some soul searching.

 

[wilds]

The 5820k seems to be a great chip if it overclocks well. When DDR4 and X99 become more affordable, I could see it being a pretty great deal.

 

[DrMrLordX]

When $100-$150 chips with stronger and stronger GPUs become faster thn $500-$1000+ chips, Intel maybe need new GPU concentration?

It's a nice thought, but that is going to vary on an application-by-application basis. Nobody in their right mind is going to think that the 7850K is as fast as, or faster than, Haswell-E in everything. Some apps won't benefit from OpenCL/HSA at all, so the compute paradigm won't extend to those areas. Neither AMD nor Intel can rely solely on iGPUs for performance.

Still, it is pretty funny that the 7850K is only 4 seconds off from the 5960x in any benchmark anywhere.

 

[Fjodor2001]

Moar coars... :biggrin:

 

[paul878]

I am going to hold on to my 2600k since all I do is game and internet.

 

[frozentundra123456]

It isn't Anand's review. Is it me or is Anand not publishing much lately?

Well, this time, I have to give him credit. Timely and pretty complete review. Only thing I would like to see is overclocking on the six core part. If the six core overclocks to 4.3 to 4.5, at less than 400.00 it could become the go to gaming cpu in a couple of years if DX12 and multithreaded games make use of a lot of cores.

 

[jsedlak]

Why aren't they testing 4k gaming and other absurd things to test whether or not the lanes matter? It seems silly to go play F1 2013 at 1080p as I can't imaging the GPUs would be pushed to their limit.

 

[RussianSensation]

Intel seriously needs to figure out a way for the CPU to shut off all the unused parts and Max Turbo the cores which are loaded. Right now this is extremely inefficient. You should be able to run a poorly threaded program on 2 cores at full 140W TDP and at the same time have the flexibility of running all 8 cores at 140W. There should be no way that a 4790K with an IGP can boost to 4.4Ghz on only 88W TDP but a $999 5960X can't just turn off 6 unused cores and use the maximum TDP for the remaining 2 cores??!! They need to figure out a way for the 5960X to hit 4.7Ghz+ on 2 cores. Why is it that since 2008 they can't figure out how to do this?

I want to upgrade but seriously the reviews show just how behind mainstream software is when discussing taking advantage of more than 4 cores. I really really want to like the 5820k, but sometimes it even loses to the 4930K. I am still waiting for a day when AAA game gives us a 30-50% increase in performance for the 6-8 core. Come on!! It seems for gamers, 2500k/2600k OC + 980s is still a better upgrade than any of these CPUs

For a new build though, for those lucky enough to be around MC, 5820K is going for $300 or only $20 over 4790K.

 

[jpiniero]

ST Turbo isn't that useful on a server chip. Presumably you will be using your server chip at full load, or no load.

For gamers, the 4790K is going to be the better choice simply because of the cheaper DDR3 memory at this point.

 

[Lyfer]

5280k plus h100i seems like the sweet spot.

 

[Remobz]

ST Turbo isn't that useful on a server chip. Presumably you will be using your server chip at full load, or no load.

For gamers, the 4790K is going to be the better choice simply because of the cheaper DDR3 memory at this point.

So for people building their first gaming rig you recommend this?

 

[Arachnotronic]

Looks like a good release. I envy those who will be picking up the 5960x!

 

[EightySix Four]

Already got a Microcenter ad in my inbox:

5820K is $299
5930K is $499
5960K is $899

ST Turbo isn't that useful on a server chip. Presumably you will be using your server chip at full load, or no load.

Not sure what kind of servers you run, but it certainly doesn't look like that at our data center.

 

[Sweepr]

i7 5820k is a better option if you plan to keep the same system for many years (like many LG1366 users did). Eventually an i7 5820k system is going to cost an extra ~$100 over an i7 4790k system, I'd happily pay that difference. Sure, it's hard to beat a quad-core Haswell >4GHz when it comes to games, but if you can OC the i7 5820k above 4GHz you're getting very similar performance and 50% more cores for future proofness.

 

[RussianSensation]

ST Turbo isn't that useful on a server chip. Presumably you will be using your server chip at full load, or no load.

For gamers, the 4790K is going to be the better choice simply because of the cheaper DDR3 memory at this point.

Yes, but not many apps take advantage of more than 4 cores. Intel should have figured out a way by now to take advantage of full TDP headroom for only the cores which are loaded. If anything it is these chips that should have the most aggressive Turbo since they have way more TDP headroom than Z97 chips. I think the reason Intel isn't enabling this is because if your 3930K could Turbo to 5Ghz on 2 cores, 4.5Ghz on 3, 4.2Ghz on 4, then people would buy that and not upgrade for 7-10 years. With weak Turbo today, they can claim that 5820K is faster than 3 year old 3960X.

 

[wilds]

All my favorite games load the AI onto 1 core which means the only way I can get a good boost in performance is to overclock. I would love to see an advanced RTS leverage multiple cores for massive amounts of AI, but that doesn't seem to be happening quite yet.

Cheaper 6 core CPUs like the 5820k should help pave the way for better multithreading support... I'm sure the same thing was said with the introduction of mainstream quads though.

 

[wand3r3r]

I want to be excited but it is pretty much of a letdown imo, unless you can actually benefit from the additional cores on the expensive models (8 core).

Buying the first nehalem (i7 920) long ago felt like you got a lot from the "enthusiast" platform, X58 was next gen and the i7 was fast.

What do you get over the haswell that's been out forever? Not much, 2 more cores but no major high end MB features exclusive to X99.

1. A mere 30% lead over the nehalem chips (from 2008)? It's been so many years already!

2. Then even a mere 770 mid range sli setup loses ~5% performance on the budget X99 chip. There's little no justification to upgrade from anything this decade.

3. Oh yeah, and the overclocking isn't anything special. It's in the range that they have all been for the past 5+ years.

That said I'll have to see if I can resist "side" grading yet again. The ddr4 premium puts me off for now. If this lasts as long as the X58 I guess I'll hop on board at some point, but maybe when the next gen CPUs come.

 

[DiogoDX]

Windows 7, with no Mantle tests? Oh come on, it's like they're doing their best to make multithreaded performance look bad... At least try to give us some idea of how it will perform with DirectX 12 games!

http://techreport.com/review/26977/intel-core-i7-5960x-processor-reviewed/9http://

 

[richierich1212]

^^^
i5-4590 kicking butt and taking names.

 

[jpiniero]

Not sure what kind of servers you run, but it certainly doesn't look like that at our data center.

I imagine a lot of companies use virtualization; Stick a ton of VMs on a host to get max utilization. So there's either no load (and power save), full load or load enough that turbo wouldn't do much. You only have to look at Intel's Big Server line - most products don't even have turbo at all.

Yes, but not many apps take advantage of more than 4 cores

You're still thinking about it as a end user perspective, and not from a server perspective. Servers can use all the threads you can give them as load increases.

 

[EightySix Four]

I imagine a lot of companies use virtualization; Stick a ton of VMs on a host to get max utilization. So there's either no load (and power save), full load or load enough that turbo wouldn't do much. You only have to look at Intel's Big Server line - most products don't even have turbo at all.

That's not quite how non-"cloud" (Azure/AWS/vMware's cloud) virtualization plays out, although it would be nice if it did. You have tons of overhead because you have to plan for worst case, which is generally 3-6x actual max load. That said, all of our workloads are so inherently multithreaded, turbo wouldn't make sense. I just meant to say that your previous description doesn't necessarily play out in your average datacenter scenario.

We care more about how many amps we are drawing from the wall and how many 16gb sticks of ram we can shove into a box than the frequency of our processors.

 

[ehume]

5280k plus h100i seems like the sweet spot.

Based on the review, I'd say the h110 was even sweeter.

 

[Lepton87]

It's hard to say what the best stress test for any Haswell uarch CPU is, but you can bet that prime95 will give you temps far exceeding anything you'd ever encounter in real world use, even at 100% on every core. Personally with my Haswell system I simply used a ton of real world applications over a period of a week and at that point deemed it stable. Haven't had any problems since. But prime95 gives me ridiculous temps, temps that I never ever see in real world use (since prime95 causes Haswell to auto increase voltage..)

It's not prime95 it's AVX/AVX2 instructions that increase CPU voltage so any software that use those instructions will also have the same effect on the CPU. Right now I don't know of any useful software that uses AVX much less AVX2 with FMA like newest revisions of IBT or prime95.