The possibility of upgrading my PC to a Haswell-E setup

Couple of days ago I posted on Facebook how I chickened out from delidding my Devil's Canyon chip. A friend told me that it would be beneficial for me to upgrade to Haswell-E instead. Haswell-E die is soldered to the IHS so it shouldn't run at a temperature as high as Devil's Canyon. And I get at least two more cores to play with.

There is a huge barrier for entry due to price

I checked the prices of the Core i7 5820K (because the 5930K is useless and the 5960X is out of reach), ASRock X99E-ITX/ac Mini-ITX motherboard (the only X99 Mini-ITX board out there) and 16GB of DDR4 2666 sticks.

• CPU: ~ JPY 50,000
• Motherboard: ~ JPY 37,000
• RAM: ~ JPY 18,000

That would total out to around JPY 105,000. Expensive, but that’s what you have to pay for cutting edge. But it all depends on how much I can make from selling my existing stuff.

I checked the offers on Sofmap store and  it was disappointing.  Very disappointing. I would only receive around JPY 50,000 in total for my Core i7 4790K CPU, Asus Z97i-Plus board and A-DATA DDR3-2400 16GB memory. That’s an insanely low amount. No way I am going to sell my stuff to these shops.

However, shops aren’t the only place I can sell them. I can auction them online. However, since these are all used parts, I bet I won’t be able to extend this to JPY 70,000 mark. JPY 60,000 is possible, but it will take a long time because I have three components to sell. And if I sell at least one of them, I would have passed the point of no return.

[Rant] Which Z97 board should I get?

This PC downsizing project is getting closer to becoming a reality. There are only  two parts of the puzzle left. First one is getting rid of the case. And the second one is getting rid of the motherboard. I've already decided on the case to get. The Silverstone Sugo SG09. If the prices of the SG10 come down closer to the price of the SG09, I would go with the SG10. As it stands today, the price difference ($30) doesn't justify getting the SG10. (Intrigued by my decision? Check out my reasoning here.)

So, what's next? I need to find a motherboard that fits my requirements. I currently have the Core i7 4770K CPU which is a bad overclocker. I would most probably be ditching it for a 4790K depending on the pricing (in Japan) and ease of getting rid of the 4770K via auctions. My aim is to overclock it as high as possible. Thus, a board made for overclocking is a good motherboard to get.

There aren't many choices in the micro-ATX segment. I checked kakaku.com to see what options I had but was a bit disappointed in the range of products listed and the pricing of them. It is not surprising that the initial prices will be high, because the shops want to exploit the wallets of the early adopters. I originally wanted to get the ROG Maximus VII Gene. But that's $260 - too overpriced in my opinion.

Then I checked what else Asus had to offer. The Z97 Gryphon from the TUF Series and the Z97M-Plus from the mainstream series were there but both of them carry the old Realtek ALC892 audio codec. So that's a deal breaker. If I had to choose one out of the two, I would go with the Gryphon because of the better build quality and the potentially higher overclock I can get out of the 4790K chip thanks to the stronger VRM circuitry.

But it seems that I wouldn't have to buy either of them as Gigabyte had a model with the ALC1150 codec for a little cheaper than the Gryphon called Z97MX-Gaming 5. Yes, it is still on the expensive side especially when you compare to the prices in the US. But this is only a problem for the early adopters. The prices will eventually settle down at a much reasonable level. In fact, sometimes the prices could get even cheaper than the US price.

Ok, I digress.

[Rant] Where are the highend mini-ITX boards from Asus with Z97 chipset?

Sadly, these were Z87 boards.

So, in my road to Mini-ITX series of posts, I'm now going to show my disappoint in Asus and their motherboard choices. Where are the high-end mini-ITX boards?

As the motherboards with the new Z97 chipset are available - even though the chipset itself doesn't provide anything substantial over its predecessor other than future proofing - it doesn't take a rocket engineer to figure out why one would want to go with a motherboard with the new chipset. Well, sometimes it is not so black and white. You might get a great deal on the older models. But as it is the end of the road for Z87 chipset, there is no argument there. Z97 is the way to go.

With the old chipset, Asus had a couple of killer mini-ITX motherboards - the Z87I-PRO and the ROG Maximus VI Impact. The latter was pretty much the best mini-ITX motherboard released to date by any manufacturer. Asus went overboard with the feature-set it offered and it required them to add four daughter boards because the mini-ITX board's dimensions were too restrictive. The two most important daughter boards were the VRM circuit and the sound card. The Z87I-PRO was similar but didn't have the sound card and the "ROG oomph". Still, it was a very good board for the money. In fact, now you can get it for as cheap as JPY 12,000 if you know where to look.