Should I wait for Haswell-E

ShindoSensei

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I was planning on building a PC by the end of the year. It would include an intel extreme edition processor, and whatever rendition of the GTX Titan is available (the ultra?) in hydro copper form. A month or two after I buy the parts I was planning on picking up a second gpu for multi monitor gaming if I felt I needed it. Of course if I bought all this, I couldn't make a similar rig in at least two or three years. I looked at the haswell-e platform, and it looks very good. It could support up to 8 cores and store 20mb of shared cache along with ddr4. I'm not too sure what lga 2011-3 would be like, but my guess is that with the release of Haswell some new technology (sata 4?) would be released, with plenty of awesome motherboards supporting it. The original motherboard I was planning on buying was the asrock exreme11, which really is amazing. I hope they continue to make something like that with haswell-e. By the time haswell e releases, Nvidia's Maxwell architecture will also increase, only adding to all the great benefits. My only problem is: would it be worth the wait? My pc isn't really that great (it was an oem from dell) but I bought a gtx 570 2 years after I bought the god forsaken thing. It can carry me as far as gaming and daily tasks go, but I plan on drafting/CADing, modding, programming, etc. I know you don't need a super computer for these, but as a said a triple monitor display needs the brawn to do it. The end of this year would mark the 4th year I had my pc, and when they say H2 of 2014 I'm not sure if that means in the summer or winter. Anyone's opinion on this?

TL;DR: I was planning on building a pc by the end of the year. my pc is meh now, not sure if should wait for haswell-e or not.
 
You're in a similar situation as me... only difference being that I don't necessarily need an extreme edition processor (but could use the extra processing power if it's worth it).

I think it's rumored that we'll see support for SAS harddrives on the 9-series chipset from intel by next year, probably for a Haswell Refresh. the same feature will probably showup on the lga 2011-3 platform (though it may still come on Ivy-E, but I doubt it). In addition, most rumors point to Haswell-E being the first platform to support DDR4 memory. I think that if both of these are true, then I would wait for Haswell-E. of course, we'll know more about that and get to see how Ivy-bridge E turns out by the end of the year.

If you can survive until mid-late 2014 on your current PC, then I would do it. as you can see by my sig, my current machine is slightly better so I think I'm definatly going to wait it out. I don't think getting triple monitor gaming is really worth it for missing out on all the cool new stuff coming out. also, have you played a decent length session on triple monitors? it's honestly not for everyone. I've tried it myself and I hardly look at the 2 side monitors. so I'll be going for a 30+ inch 4K monitor when they drop down to $2-2.5k
 
... I would highly suggest looking at what you need to do again. A single titan is just FINE for gaming on three monitors (and there are way better options anyways). As for CAD, the extreme edition processor... sure. But two titans? They wouldn't even come close to a low end workstation card - it's two completely different types of brawn you're looking for here.

I suggest going with an i5 and 770 / 780 for gaming, and then building yourself a workstation, rather than blowing $2k on a pair of titans that are bad value, way more than you need for gaming, and not the right type of power for what you need for designing.
 

ShindoSensei

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My other concern is that when haswell e releases, it might take some time for good technology that supports it to come. I'm not expert on hardware marketing, but let's say something like the asrock extreme11 (my personal favorite motherboard) would take a while to release. In my opinion it was a mistake announcing haswell right before sandy. If i were a consumer the last thing I would do is buy a sandy bridge, when I could wait a couple months. I think the best course of action would be to see how much you can pull out. If I feel like I'm wasting precious time away I might just go ahead and seal the deal. It won't make that big of a difference for someone who is still a novice in the huge spectrum of pcs, but why settle for less? Also, in my opinion triple monitor gaming rocks. You can't have a huge screen up in your face while you do it however, position it so much that each monitor just barley fits your peripheral vision, it can get extremely immersive if done right.
 

ShindoSensei

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The 6GB of VRAM the titan offers is too much to pass when you're playing at ultra high resolutions. Top that with constant mods, and texture packs and you can barley be getting away with what you have. Unfortunately, vram does not stack, if it did I would pick up 2 780s and I would be done. I'm more of a gamer than a CADer, and it will likely stay that way for the following years. I'm no where near being skilled, so the TITAN architecture would be more than adequate for me now.
 


if you're worried about memory, even the 3GB of a 7970 have been show to handle upto 4K resolutions (~30 or slightly less fps) on hitman absolution (I believe) and a few other games. you don't need 6GB of VRAM in this day and age, it's a marketing gimmick. 3gb of the 7970, sure. a pair of 780 or 7770s with 4GB? that would be perfect... you honestly won't get as far as you think with a Titan. besides, cards with custom PCBs, such as ASUS's 780 Direct CU, actually produces more fps than the titan :p

and honestly, if you're more of a gamer, then just do CAD with CPU power. you're already buying an extreme architecture, it'll be fine. if you'll honestly be doing multi-day calculations and renderings, do you really want your gaming rig to be hung up doing that so you can't game at all? build a cheap CAD rig and offload that stuff to the closet