Pages

Monday, February 24, 2014

[Rant] Haswell refresh?

We all know how much of a crappy chip Haswell is when it comes to overclocking. (Refer this post about temps and this post about FIVR). All I have managed is a measly 4.3GHz out of my Core i7 4770K. (Refer this post) My old 2600K was capable of 4.5GHz, so the Haswell upgrade hasn’t given me a big boost. It’s still faster but not fast enough.

Intel is releasing Haswell Refresh CPUs soon and already MSI and Asus have claimed that their current boards will support these new CPUs with a bios update. Why this is important is because it seems Intel is going to release a new chipset – the 9 series – along with these new CPUs. That doesn’t sound right though. The 8-series is very strong, and there isn’t anything architecturally new with Haswell Refresh which requires a new chipset. They should do it for Broadwell. This is a weird move if they release 9 series this soon.

Anyways, what's actually new about these CPUs? Are the faster? Are they going to overclock higher? Will the die be soldered to the heat spreader?

From what I can see, they are only bringing a slight clock boost to the existing line up and Iris Pro graphics (perhaps).

image

For me, the most disappointing thins is that all of the new CPUs seem to be non-K variant. Which means, they don't overclock at all. If you cannot overclock the CPU, then I would assume that these won't be any better than the current CPUs - scaling and thermal wise. The Haswell chips at stock clocks don't have a problem. It's when you start overclocking, that they start to act dumb.

But if that is the case, I don't know why Intel is making such a big deal out of it. They could have simply released these CPU as when they released the Core i7 4771 a little while ago. Maybe there are newer K-variants coming and nobody still knows about it.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...