Should I wait for Haswell?

[vance09]

I don't currently have a gaming computer and I was going to go with an i5 3570k, but now I hear that Haswell is coming out in 5 months? Should I wait, or will Ivy Bridge be good for gaming for the next few years? Thanks a lot!

 

[vance09]

Oh, and I'm not planning on using the PC for any video editing or other extreme tasks.

 

[bumnut53]

If you have nothing, buy the best you can afford now. There is always something better round the corner.

 

[amuffin]

Buy because you have to.

 

[vance09]

Do you think Ivy Bridge will be good enough for the next couple of years? I won't be missing out on anything, right?

 

[amuffin]

You'll always be missing out.

There will be new chips every single year offering more performance than the previous ones.

Sure it will be good enough for the next few years.

 

[jaguarskx]

Iv Bridge should last you a few years. It all depends on what your expectations are and how much performance you want. If you buy an i5-3570k and within a week you think it is too slow, then your expectations are excessively high.

My current PC is built around a Q9450 @ 3.0GHz. Even though it is over 4 years old, it is still fast enough for my purposes and I do some video encoding which is CPU intensive.

I'm waiting for either Haswell or Broadwell (2014).

 

[vance09]

So, do you think by overclocking I can reach or exceed a Haswell?

 

[jaguarskx]

No one knows exactly how much faster Haswell will be over Ivy Bridge. Some people say 10% - 20%. I think it will be less than 10% because I believe Intel is focusing on making Haswell more power efficient than more powerful. That's because they need to expand beyond PCs and laptops where growth is slowing down. Desktop PC sales are actually shrinking a bit. But in any case OC'ing will give you better than stock performance.

Intel needs to get CPUs into tablets which is a growth industry. But they need to use CPUs that uses less power than laptop CPUs. That's why I believe Haswell will offer a relatively performance increase. Broadwell is Haswell's successor and will be released in 2014 which I believe will increase performance by 10% - 15% over Haswell. 20% would probably be wishful thinking, but who knows? It might be possible.

 

[vance09]

Yeah, I guess you're right. If I waited for the next best thing, I would be waiting forever. I'll go with Ivy, thanks for your help.

 

[vance09]

Best answer selected by vance09.