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Z87 - wow!

Gouhan

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Hmmm never posted here, but this is as good a time as any seeing as this is a private section.
Pics will come later, but wow I'm really impressed with HASWELL/Z87.
I had thought it would be more like Z68/Z77 but it's very much different. For the first time I think all vendors or at least the top 4 brought their best to the sandbox, first time out.
It's not going to be a single horse race with ASUS so far in the lead it makes you wonder why others bother. For the fiirst time ever in my life, I read a motherboard manual. The GIGABYTE Z87X-OC is just that intimidating. I looked at it and was just at a loss for what all the buttons and switches on the board do. Some really cool ones though like OC-Ignition (this wiill be pivotal to avoiding cold boot bugs) and OC-Trigger I'm thoroughly impressed by. The time I spent at HQ, going back and forth, the arguments and raised voice and tempers have ultimately resulted in a board that just by looking at it, aims to be the best in the business.

MSI as well, has come to the party with their most through BIOS ever. The sheer amount of options available are reminiscent of DFI and I shudder to think how long it's going to take most of us to get a grip on just what all the new options bring to the table. Right now I'm just messing around with GT2 4600 HD Graphics and this is another area where, I'm very impressed with all vendors but in particular INTEL.
From HD 4000 to HD 4600, INTEL has doubled the performance in some cases. I couldn't believe it but the 3DMark results have increased dramatically, and even in FPS in games. IGP overclocking is no longer an AMD exclusive.
Anyway, like I said pics to come later. I'm just overwhelmed that at this point already I have way too many motherboards, and more coming in, in the next few weeks leading up to Computex, when the hammer will drop and I'll be drowning in them and reviews. I'll keep you all posted on my experiences here.

One thing I will say though is that Core i5/i7 4K series is tons of fun and runs rather cool. Tweaking and real overclocking just may be back, binning will never end but at it least it's not the end all, be all of things.
 
Upon further testing this is really tricky.
Memory OC is much much better, but Haswell isn't that much cooler than Ivy-Bridge. It's marginal at best. Overclocking is still limited to the 4.6Ghz range.
suppose it's the process limitation at this point. Still a lot more to test though to confirm. Regardless, for most of us it's Haswell or nothing, no point in going Ivy right now.
4.6GHz needs 1.25V as 1.2V isn't that stable. Max temp on any single core with HT is 74'C.
For specific tasks like encoding with AVX enabled software, it's much much faster than Ivy-Bridge. at worst, Z87 boards are just so much more badass than Ivy boards, that alone makes it worhtwhile
 
thanks bud, keep the info flowing.

how many 4770k's have ya managed to test? what about cold? air is for girls :D
 
Been stuck on stupid deadlines haven't even been able to ship out stuff
Anyway
TBH keep your high clocking Ivy CPU. Haswell CPUs are bummed for now, with the first batch of retail samples sucking majorly more so than ES
Best I've seen so far under cold is around 6.2 to 6.3
Granted you can add IPC and very high speed memory to that, you're looking at the equivalent 6.5GHz Ivy performance maybe 6.6GHz but that is a stretch though
CPU in general is actually hotter, forgot that with the heat here I have the AC on all day do ambient temps are much lower than normal.
Either way input voltage on these is 1.8V which is what's making the CPUs rather hot as well hence the 84W TDP to some degree.

I think future stepping will improve CPU overclocking but for now Ivy is still KING.
Mem clocking is fun though especially now that Haswell will eat AMD mem clocks alive (new mem record is above 4GHz btw)
Oh be careful as well with some boards and the new sleep sates/S0ix because I've my wonderful MPower Max has died just from trying to go into a sleep state using the 1.25 Strap
Slept and never came back to life ever again, so RMA in the works.

Once again, do be careful with the higher straps and the hibernation/sleep features.
 
(new mem record is above 4GHz btw)

You referring to an Intel record or Christian Ney's 4+ GHz AMD backup? :p

Ivy may be king on LN2, but how's Haswell doing on air?
 
Everyone now has 4ghz on Haswell with hynix fxr memory. Some way above 4100. So AMD backups won't help. On air its harder to oc than ivy as well. It's hot
 

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