Z77,X79 Or Haswell

[_Hayabusa_]

Hey everybody this my first post regarding a new build. I currently have a x58 build I want to upgrade but don't know which path to take. Should I go to Z77 or X79 I do a lot of gaming and web development.

Or should I just wait it out for Haswell chipset? Also in regards to Haswell will it perform better then X79 and what specifications can be confirmed regarding the Haswell chipset 6 cores?, Pcie 3.0 etc. thank you in advance

 

[Wizz72]

Im currently in the same boat,running i7 920 @ 3.8ghz,i have a major upgrade itch that i cant shift,i have been looking extensively at Ivy Bridge and X79 whilst trying to wait for Haswell.

Haswell will be a 'tock' for Intel meaning that it should have substantial improvements in architecture resulting in 10 % - 15% improvements in speed over Ivy ,if however your waiting on the six core versions these are as yet not slated for the Q2 release,this date initially only providing the quad core varieties all with varying levels of cache and on board graphics.
It will use LGA-1150 socket and 22nm,the highend chipset will be Z87 with integrated voltage regulators,support for USB3,SATA 6GBS,PCI E xpress 2.0 (5GT/s) with PCIE 3.0 compatibility,Rapid Storage Technology 12 with TRIM support in RAID 0.

Both the Z77 and X79 platforms would serve you well for your purposes,Ivy bridge will give you SATA 6 and USB/PCIe 3 and would get the nod toward gaming with the 3570k for a relatively cheap outlay,the 3770k with hyperthreading is more expensive but better for heavily threaded apps,both run hot when overclocked tho.

X79 will give you access to 6 cores (unless you take the 4 core 3820)and quad memory albeit expensively, it will also provide you with future CPU upgrades such as IvyBride E whereas the Z77 is essentially a dead platform.Its probably overkill if used purely for gaming but ofc it excells in multi threaded apps.

To be honest its probably worth waiting for Haswell now if you can resist the urge to upgrade for a short while.

If you havent already overclocked your CPU on your X58 you may find a nice performance 'bump' there,couple that with a SSD and a decent GPU (both of which can be used in your new build when it happens)and your X58 should tide you over nicely until Haswell finally arrives

 

[ShintaiDK]

Certainly not X79.

Either Z77 or wait for Haswell. Haswell will be dual and quadcores only on LGA1150 thats the first to arrive.

Chipsets offers close to nothing in difference. All that matters is on the CPU.

 

[BrightCandle]

X79 is expensive, and the 6 cores are only any use if you have a tool that can utilise them. I am specifically writing server targeted multi threaded programs and hence I can utilise the cores with my custom software and the compilation of that software. But most people really don't use tools that utilise that sort of hardware. For them the expense of X79 isn't worth it, because in a single thread its slower than Ivy Bridge and it doesn't overclock as well as Sandy Bridge. All in all SB-E is worse than SB and IB except if you have a use that needs more cores/more ram or lots of PCI-E 2.0 slots. Multi GPUs is a possibility but it only seems to remotely come into play at 3 cards and even then IB seems to outperform SB-E despite the additional lanes.

If you are asking then the answer is you don't need SB-E. You know if you would benefit from it already.

Which leaves you either waiting until early next year for a product we don't know a lot about or upgrading today for about +25% extra IPC and possibly another +25% in clock speed from additional overclocking headroom. 50% extra performance for single threaded and the same cores isn't bad, it should be noticeable but its not a massive improvement in the grand scheme of things. Haswell will likely bring +10% IPC at least and maybe a lot more than that with its new FPU vector units. But its unlikely to be a massive improvement in IPC or clock speed in the general case.

 

[_Hayabusa_]

Thank you for the suggestions guys you have cleared up a lot of issues for me just a couple more questions if I wait and upgrade to Haswell and the pcie lanes are running at 2.0 will this bottleneck the next round of GPUS (8970, Gtx 780) also if I was to wait to for haswell is there an option for me to go 6 cores or is it confirmed quad core only chipset.

Thank for being patient I appreciate.

 

[_Hayabusa_]

Im currently in the same boat,running i7 920 @ 3.8ghz,i have a major upgrade itch that i cant shift,i have been looking extensively at Ivy Bridge and X79 whilst trying to wait for Haswell.

Haswell will be a 'tock' for Intel meaning that it should have substantial improvements in architecture resulting in 10 % - 15% improvements in speed over Ivy ,if however your waiting on the six core versions these are as yet not slated for the Q2 release,this date initially only providing the quad core varieties all with varying levels of cache and on board graphics.
It will use LGA-1150 socket and 22nm,the highend chipset will be Z87 with integrated voltage regulators,support for USB3,SATA 6GBS,PCI E xpress 2.0 (5GT/s) with PCIE 3.0 compatibility,Rapid Storage Technology 12 with TRIM support in RAID 0.

Both the Z77 and X79 platforms would serve you well for your purposes,Ivy bridge will give you SATA 6 and USB/PCIe 3 and would get the nod toward gaming with the 3570k for a relatively cheap outlay,the 3770k with hyperthreading is more expensive but better for heavily threaded apps,both run hot when overclocked tho.

X79 will give you access to 6 cores (unless you take the 4 core 3820)and quad memory albeit expensively, it will also provide you with future CPU upgrades such as IvyBride E whereas the Z77 is essentially a dead platform.Its probably overkill if used purely for gaming but ofc it excells in multi threaded apps.

To be honest its probably worth waiting for Haswell now if you can resist the urge to upgrade for a short while.

If you havent already overclocked your CPU on your X58 you may find a nice performance 'bump' there,couple that with a SSD and a decent GPU (both of which can be used in your new build when it happens)and your X58 should tide you over nicely until Haswell finally arrives

If you compared the 3820 to i7 920 both over clocked @ 4.2ghz How much of an improvement would it be

 

[Wizz72]

The 3820 clock for clock will be faster yes but thats probably outweighed by the cost of changing your Mobo,Ram and CPU for the performance you would gain.Some would say going X79 with a quad core is irrelevant but its a good chip thats partially unlocked,most people get an easy 4.5+ghz.

The X79 platform will however draw more power (especially if fitted with a six core chip,they are power hungry) than the X58 and Z77.It will tho as i said before leave you with any IB E Cpu upgrade path in the future,so if you didnt want to buy the expensive 3930k or 3960x right now the 3820 could provide a nice little stop gap.

As a gaming platform its maybe only worth going X79 if you want to use two or three GPU's,with one gpu it will perform similarly to a much less costly 3570k Z77 setup.

The i7 920 is still a good chip,especially when overclocked.
I have one running with a 7970 on a Gigabyte EX58 UD3R and in BF3 multiplayer on a 24inch Dell @1900*1200, i get a good 50 fps minimum to 110+ fps on large 64 player maps with most settings on high and some on ultra.Using the in game console CPU/GPU graph neither bottlenecks the other,tracing each other very closesly both with nice low millisecond draw results,not too shabby for something introduced in 2008.

It is starting to show its age however,but not so much that i feel inclined to rush out and spend big $$$ on other 'available now' platforms for a 15% increase in performance(which in gaming im probably not really going to notice on a 60hz monitor anyway)when Haswell is just round the corner.

That being said,any of the current X79 or Z77 setups available should serve you well for the next couple of years if you cant wait.

Personally i particulary like the functionality of the Z77.One of my reasons for looking into upgrading now is that my 7970 with its PCIe 3 has a peculiar habit of hard locking my X58 system,very annoying and nothing i do seems to remedy it,there a plenty of others who experience this same problem with Ati 7*** series cards on older systems in certain game titles,it also appears that IB with its PCIe3 capabilities does not suffer from this.If it werent for this issue i doubt i would go IB now and i would wait for Haswell.

As far as im aware Haswell will support PCIe 3.0.I cant imagine the next generation of GPUs bottlenecking even PCIe 2.0 nevermind 3.0 but unfortunately this is all an unknown quantity to me so im just guessing there.

Also there should be six core varieties of Haswell but much later on and probably not for mainstream on the LGA-1150 platform,and they will im sure carry a similar price premium as do the SB-E six core versions now.

 

[mfenn]

If you are asking then the answer is you don't need SB-E. You know if you would benefit from it already.

:thumbsup: Agree 100%.

Thank you for the suggestions guys you have cleared up a lot of issues for me just a couple more questions if I wait and upgrade to Haswell and the pcie lanes are running at 2.0 will this bottleneck the next round of GPUS (8970, Gtx 780) also if I was to wait to for haswell is there an option for me to go 6 cores or is it confirmed quad core only chipset.

Thank for being patient I appreciate.

There will be six and eight core variants of Haswell, but not immediately and not on the standard consumer level chipsets. However, see above. If you are even asking questions about six-core processors, that means that you don't need one, and will be well-served by Z77 or quad-core Haswell.

As for PCIe, nobody knows the future of course, but it is extremely unlikely that the next generation of GPUs will be bottlenecked by PCIe 2.0. The current generation is only affected a couple of percent when running at PCIe 2.0 x8 speeds (aka PCIe 1.1 x16), so you have nothing to worry about.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Thank you for the suggestions guys you have cleared up a lot of issues for me just a couple more questions if I wait and upgrade to Haswell and the pcie lanes are running at 2.0 will this bottleneck the next round of GPUS (8970, Gtx 780) also if I was to wait to for haswell is there an option for me to go 6 cores or is it confirmed quad core only chipset.

Thank for being patient I appreciate.

PCie 2.0 wont bottleneck the GPUs for a few years ahead for sure. Only if you run crossfire/SLI perhaps.

 

[BrightCandle]

If you compared the 3820 to i7 920 both over clocked @ 4.2ghz How much of an improvement would it be

On average about 25%.

Although an i7 920 D stepping chip would be about its max at 4.2Ghz whereas the 3820 will go to 4.5-4.8 on similar cooling and voltage.