Ivy Bridge or Haswell for gaming?

[Rise and Shine]

Hey,

I have already planned every part for my computer that I'm going to build in October or November.
Since I'm going to build it by then, Haswell will only be half a year away. The question is, will it be worth it to
build with IB as soon as possible or should I wait for H? Is the next tock going to be a big leap in performance
like SB? Note that this is a gaming rig. I have seen a site that says that it will be like this year's tick rather than a big leap.

 

[rolli59]

Why wait a half a year in three years they will have something much better. To sum it up there is always something new around the corner and it is pointless waiting if you need to buy/upgrade.

 

[jaguarskx]

There's always something better on the horizon. Generally speaking, if you can wait, then wait. If you can't then just get IB.

It's unknown what the performance increase will be from IB to Haswell; a rough guess would be anywhere from 10% - 20% (very high estimate). Most games are limited by the GPU rather than the CPU, but there are many games that can benefit from powerful CPUs and GPUs. For example, Crysis 2 doesn't care if your Core i5 is running at 2.0GHz or 4.0GHz when playing at 1920x1200 resolution; the difference would only be a few frames. Skyrim on the other hand benefits from both CPU and GPU.

My Q9450 still provides me with good performance so I skipping IB and looking to upgrade to Haswell next year or Broadwell in 2014.

 

[Rise and Shine]

Well, I've read the Wikipedia article and the only two new features that might actually be interesting for gamers:

- Increase of base clock from 100 MHz to 133 MHz

- Voltage controller integrated in the CPU and not in the mobo

I've made a calculation and I've found out that with the same 34x multiplier of the i5 3570k a Haswell processor could reach 4.522 GHz. Will it really have
that? These were in the "Expected Features" part of the article, so they may or may not appear.







Don't...

Bump posts


http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/283384-33-read-first

 

[jaguarskx]

I've made a calculation and I've found out that with the same 34x multiplier of the i5 3570k a Haswell processor could reach 4.522 GHz.

That's assuming they will both use the same multiplier which is highly unlikely.

Haswell's true performance should be coming from increased IPC (Instructions Per Cycle). That basically means in it can execute more instructions per Hz than Ivy Bridge can. Thus, if both Haswell and IB CPUs had the same clock speed, Haswell would be more powerful.

Whether you should upgrade to IB or wait for Haswell depends on the specs of your current PC and if it provides acceptable performance. If your current PC is slower than what you like it to be, then go with IB. If the performance is acceptable, then wait for Haswell.

 

[Rise and Shine]

I have the first dual core that was made by Intel, so yeah, I'll upgrade to IB then. And if Haswell is better, then I'll buy a H100 and OC it to hell.