My Haswell Upgrade Experience

[Hulk]

I had a really hard time determining if I was going to upgrade my 2500i to Ivy Bridge, Haswell, or no upgrade at all. I had the itch to get something faster for video editing and transcoding so I wanted a processor with Hyperthreading. Of course the easy route would have been Ivy and I could have just dropped in a 3770k and (hopefully) that would have been the end of it. Then the Microcenter sale came up with Haswell only costing $200. I decided to give it a go with a Gigabyte GA-Z87-H3H mATX motherboard. I reused everything else in my signature.

The build was straightforward but I was having all kinds of restarts, crash memory dumps, and freezes. Luckily a BIOS flash from the shipping F6 to F8 cured all of those problems. I'm going to run at stock for a while longer before I start overclocking as I want to make sure I'm 100% stable at stock before overclocking.

So I guess the big question is what it worth it? Well that is subjective question for everyone but for me I'm glad I made the move to Haswell. Of course in most applications there is no discernible difference between the 2500k o/c 4.2 and 4770k stock. Word, Excel, Corel Draw X5, Quickbooks, web browsing, etc..

But for some applications there is a performance difference I can feel. In Photoshop when I'm working with large photos and applying some of the more compute intensive effects. No OpenCL here I'm still on Elements 4.0.

Ripbot 2-pass encoding with a crop to 16:9 is twice as fast. From an average of 15fps to 30fps for the 4770k. And that's comparing o/c 2500k to stock 4770k. Of course any video rendering in Sony Vegas Pro 12 is faster as well. I can also put more plug-ins in a multi-track audio project in Presonus Studio One 2 before I start to get drop outs.

I know a lot of people in here are debating an upgrade and the more info the better when making the decision.

 

[escrow4]

I built me a 4770 office box with a Z87X-UD4H and some 1TB SSDs yesterday. Needed something that wouldn't flinch from any task. Not gaming, I have 4770 box for that. Everything is just fluid, no problems, no complaints, nothing. And yes, flash the BIOS and make sure you get the latest chipset drivers. The Intel installer upgraded a lot of the chipset bits here.

 

[tweakboy]

Grab a 4770k and latest nvidia or ati at the moment.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Haswell might of been a good upgrade for my 920 but I wasn't impressed with the OC'ing and the thermal scaling.. it sounds crazy but at first I spent ~ 500$ for an i7 970 not too long ago, but in the end I did re-coupe some of my money cutting the cost down somewhere in the low 300's. For me this was easy as no OS re-install was necessary. I'm waiting till another nostalgic platform and chip comes along. Oh, and the L5639 Xeon is a kick! Love that little thing

 

[FalseChristian]

ONLY the i7-4770K and up is an upgrade for an overclocked Sandy Bridge i5 2500K at 4.5GHz. Everything else is a waste of money. I'm planning on upgrading in the near future and it will be a Haswell i7-4770K. Hopefully it'll overclock to at least 4.2GHz.

 

[nwo]

ONLY the i7-4770K and up is an upgrade for an overclocked Sandy Bridge i5 2500K at 4.5GHz. Everything else is a waste of money. I'm planning on upgrading in the near future and it will be a Haswell i7-4770K. Hopefully it'll overclock to at least 4.2GHz.

My i7 4770k doesn't even break a sweat OCing to 4.3GHz... It does run quite a bit warmer than my i5 3570k @4.3GHz though, and my i7 has the Cooler Master Hyper 212+ whicle my i5 has a budget Zalman equivalent of the CM 212+ which I got for $10 after MIR. Both of them have only 1x120mm fan installed with the option to add another for the summer

 

[Burpo]

Thanks Hulk, for a great straight forward, informative review. I suspected as much, but good to hear

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

Haswell might of been a good upgrade for my 920 but I wasn't impressed with the OC'ing and the thermal scaling.. it sounds crazy but at first I spent ~ 500$ for an i7 970 not too long ago, but in the end I did re-coupe some of my money cutting the cost down somewhere in the low 300's. For me this was easy as no OS re-install was necessary. I'm waiting till another nostalgic platform and chip comes along. Oh, and the L5639 Xeon is a kick! Love that little thing

Haswell-E buddy! We need to start a 1366 owners club.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Haswell-E buddy! We need to start a 1366 owners club.

I might overclock these 6 core 32nm chips when Haswell-E comes along, hah

 

[VirtualLarry]

Haswell-E buddy! We need to start a 1366 owners club.

Haswell-E octocore with HT and DDR4 might just be enough of a jump to get me to ditch my overclocked Q9300 @ 3.0.

 

[DigDog]

haswsell-e four core??

my reasoning was this:
1)the 4770k is the only real upgrade from the 2500k.
2)the new 4820k is identical, bit more expensive on 2011, but you don't have to put up with delidding/tim bs
3)the "new" 4820k is only one year away, or less. (and ddr4, for whatever that's worth)

so i'll just wait until "whatever is the replacement for the 4820k" comes out.

 

[WinSomeLoseNone]

I went from a 2500K @ 4.8 to a 4770k @ 4.6 last week. I also jumped on the $199 Microcenter deal.

My findings so far:
Haswell is hot, no denying that.

Using an H100:
2500k @ 4.8 1.37V under full load maxed @ 71C
4770k @ 4.6 1.275V under full load maxed @ 82C

The 4770k was 100% Stable @ 4.7 1.300 W/ 4.4 cache @ 1.235 but the temps crossed 85C which is outside my comfort zone.

Final OC on the 4770k:

core 4.6 @ 1.275 - adaptive
cache 4.3 @ 1.230 - adaptive
Input: Auto

I'm happy with this as haswell @ 4.6 > SB @ 4.8 by a decent margin. The temps do suck though so I'm considering a delid with some CLP/CLU under the IHS (but I'm scared, lol)

 

[Hulk]

I hear you regarding the temps. I think with Haswell we just have to accept the fact that "80C is the new 70C."

 

[JimmiG]

Indeed, and with AVX2 tests you can add another 5 - 10C to those temps.

 

[daRkKon]

theyll probably get it cooler on the next architecture design, the first ones always a rough start because they try and squeeze performance first before efficiency or are just sandbagging. i think i might just say screw it over clock mine and stay it out another year til 2015. unless something more demanding than frostbite 3 engine comes out

 

[ChronoReverse]

AVX2 is much more than 10c hotter on my i7-4770k.

For example, I'm running a light OC to 4.3GHz (1.165v) with my H110 cooler.

Regular 100% cpu loads (video encoding using handbrake, prime95 non-avx, etc.) top out at 50c.

AVX loads (Prime95AVX, IBT) push all the way to 70c!

 

[tential]

I hear you regarding the temps. I think with Haswell we just have to accept the fact that "80C is the new 70C."

If it works it works. I'm not going to complain about something I can't really see/hear.

That said, if I had a 2500k, I dunno if I could upgrade but seems like you have programs that take advantage of Haswell Instruction Sets. I wonder when the next huge performance boost will be. Not saying we need it for MOST things, but I'm just wondering what it will be and what it will do. Especially if Mantle comes around which is supposed to further reduce CPU overhead.

 

[Hulk]

If it works it works. I'm not going to complain about something I can't really see/hear.

That said, if I had a 2500k, I dunno if I could upgrade but seems like you have programs that take advantage of Haswell Instruction Sets. I wonder when the next huge performance boost will be. Not saying we need it for MOST things, but I'm just wondering what it will be and what it will do. Especially if Mantle comes around which is supposed to further reduce CPU overhead.

I could have definitely lived with my 2500k for a long time but the $200 4770k deal was too good to pass up. Especially considering all I needed was the CPU and a motherboard. The next upgrade will most likely include CPU, motherboard, and memory. That being said who knows when that will be?

It really looks like we're nearly topped out as far as clockspeed and IPC are concerned. The technical challenges along with the fact that Intel doesn't see the money in going in those directions leads me to believe more cores is the only way I'd be inclined to upgrade. What would it take? It would have to be 8 cores at a price point of $300 or so. And even then, if we don't have the software to really support those additional cores I don't think I'll bite.

With the early rumors of BGA only Broadwell and the impending "death of the desktop" or at least Intel's focus on low power/efficiency for ultra mobile who knows when we'll see a desktop part that is significantly faster than the Haswell based 4770k? If I had a 2600k instead of the 2500k I probably wouldn't have upgraded either. It was the better IPC of Haswell and the addition of hyperthreading, and of course the deal.

The next few years should be very interesting. I think we'll see some very significant increases in efficiency and iGPU from Broadwell and very, very little IPC improvement, if anything. So unless Broadwell turns out to be an overclocking monster, which I highly doubt, or Intel decides to give us 6 cores at the current 4 core pricing, I believe the enthusiast community may be seriously underwhelmed with Broadwell on the desktop. Which might not matter to Intel because they will still sell the majority of the desktop parts that are sold, and will probably punch further into the tablet and phone market with their 14nm process.

Now that I think about this it is a little depressing. I've been following the desktop CPU market for 30 years, always looking forward to the next big thing, the next architecture. And now there is little to look forward to or so it seems on the horizon for desktop CPU's. Luckily, for 99% of the work I do my current set up is sufficient. MS Office? Yup no problem, no wait. Corel Draw, no problem. Business apps like Quickbooks? A joke. Web creation apps? No problem. Photo editing? Could always use more compute but honestly there is no "pain" waiting on the CPU. Video editing? This is one spot where a little more compute is always welcome. But honestly with OpenCL support and a good GPU, the onus is more on the software developers to harness the GPU power available than for the CPU to get it done.

Like I wrote, the next few years should be interesting.