Thread: Haswell, Buy or Wait?

AMD Radeon 7970 is the gpu I'm running. I'm only getting 40-45% utilization bc of my processor.

Next question:

The price difference (on the online site I buy from) is only $14 between the 3770k ($345cad) vs. 4770k ($359cad)?? Is this telling us something?

That's a beast of card you have there man.

Yeah I bit the bullet and ponied up for it and I can't even put it to work. I didn't expect my cpu to fall so short.

Originally Posted by Ace22

Yeah I bit the bullet and ponied up for it and I can't even put it to work. I didn't expect my cpu to fall so short.

That 970 shouldn't bottle neck so hard though. I wonder whats going on. Well more importantly I just figured out that the E series for Haswell is coming so I suggest waiting until those come out and purchasing then. If however you feel as though you cant wait why not get one now. Just make sure its a K.

Haswell-E will run at least a grand. Overpriced for what you get. Overkill for gaming. On Tom's Hardware charts, there's only a very small performance gap (less than 5 frames on average) between Haswell & the 970 you have. In fact, Ivy Bridge outperforms Haswell in some of the benchmarks.

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Originally Posted by WileECyte

Haswell-E will run at least a grand. Overpriced for what you get. Overkill for gaming. On Tom's Hardware charts, there's only a very small performance gap (less than 5 frames on average) between Haswell & the 970 you have. In fact, Ivy Bridge outperforms Haswell in some of the benchmarks.

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Wasn't aware how much they were going to be. That's a bummer really. It's like Intel made it intentionally hard to actually find the best bang for your buck. It's actually quite annoying. It happened with ivy bridge and now Haswell. I have been waiting for a new CPU from them that is spot on marked improvement in every way for a year now and I haven't seen it yet.

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Originally Posted by Nuckle

How are you guys determining where your bottleneck lies?

GPU-Z lets you access sensors on the GPUs to let you see the GPU usage. Windows also comes with a resource monitor that shows you the usage of each CPU core you have. All you have to do is put both of those up on another monitor while in-game and see which one peaks first.

I use Playclaw, which has an overlay showing CPU and GPU temps (per core) and usage (per core) without needing another monitor or alt-tabbing out of the game.

Edit: I realize you weren't directing the question at me, just figured I'd put this out there since we talk about it a lot.

Originally Posted by SourceSkills

Wasn't aware how much they were going to be. That's a bummer really. It's like Intel made it intentionally hard to actually find the best bang for your buck. It's actually quite annoying. It happened with ivy bridge and now Haswell. I have been waiting for a new CPU from them that is spot on marked improvement in every way for a year now and I haven't seen it yet.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Note 2.

All of the 'E' series parts are premium price parts... Ivy Bridge 'E' hasn't even officially launched yet. It was announced for Sept 2013. A couple of TPGers have Sandy Bridge E parts... HeavyG and Kanati are two I know have them.. You can sometimes get a deal on them (which is what happened with Heavy) but they are a premium price part, and typically aren't worth the premium to a gamer.

Intel Core i7-3970X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E 3.5GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 150W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80619i73970X - Newegg.com
Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge-E 3.3GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80619i73960X - Newegg.com

The one 'bargain'

Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80619i73930K - Newegg.com