Ordered the Devil of a 4790K

I managed to successfully sell the old Core i7 4770K via Rakuten Auctions. I have a week to send the CPU to its new owner, but before that I had to buy a new 4790K CPU.

I waited for CPU + motherboard combo deals for weeks. Like I mentioned in the earlier post, Sofmap is selling CPU + motherboard combo for with a JPY5000 discount, but they are not selling any motherboard that I want to buy. If I was going to get a motherboard as well, I wanted it to be a Micro ATX motherboard, which is imperative to my PC shrinking project. As there weren’t any appealing online deals, I decide to finally buy just the CPU and ordered the 4790K in the evening from Amazon. I paid extra for the instant delivery - it's a small sum - so that I could get it one Saturday and play with it over the weekend.

I'm still not sure that I would be getting a good chip. If the past is any indication, it would be a crappy overclocker - I would probably get 4.6GHz at 1.3V. It'll be still better than my old chip and probably will run cooler and use less power.

Looks like I’m getting a 4790K after all

Remember that I decided to auction my current Core i7 4770K chip on Rakuten auctions? Someone finally bid for it. One guy also asked the price for both the CPU and the motherboard but his offer was too low so I defaulted. But at least, I have managed to sell me CPU – on paper, for the time being.

He bought it for the starting price though – that’s JPY28,000. It’s a shame that nobody bothered to place a bid for it, despite many people adding it to their watch list. I guess they do this so that they get a notification in case the seller – in this case me – drops the starting bid down to attract potential bidders.

The guy hasn’t paid for the CPU yet. He probably will pay for it soon as he has mostly positive ratings. But when will he pay for it? I hope he delays as much as possible. I still haven’t seen any of the CPU + motherboard combo deals other than the ones that Sofmap has posted (the link might be broken by the time you check it out though). But they are selling just the Gigabyte motherboards and even then, none of them are Micro-ATX boards. I want to get a Micro-ATX board. I want it to go into the Silverstone SUGO SG09 or SG10 case eventually. As I still haven’t managed to sell my current case, I would have to keep using this new motherboard for the time being.

Z97 Micro-ATX boards and Wi-Fi support

I’ve been looking at few of the Micro-ATX motherboards based on Intel’s Z97 chipset to go in my future SFF build in the Silverstone Sugo SG10 case, but none of them seems to come with integrated Wi-Fi connectivity. The Mini-ITX boards and the high-end standard ATX boards do. I find this weird.

The boards I had been looking at are:

• Asus Maximus VII Gene
• Asus Z97 Gryphon
• Gigabyte Z97MX Gaming 5
• ASRock Z97M OC Formula
• MSI Z97M GAMING

None of these have Wi-Fi support. Not even the old 802.11n. I cannot believe these companies have ruled out these motherboards as suitable for portable gaming rigs. Maybe that’s why. These are “gaming” oriented boards. No gamer uses Wi-Fi connectivity when playing games. Maybe the manufacturers think that they are not useful either.

But I would have liked to see the option in there. I mean, if the mini-ITX boards have Wi-Fi, I don’t see any reason why the Micro-ATX variants cannot. They have all the real-estate to implement it.

Disappointed, like always!