A day after our Core i7-4770K coverage went live, Intel celebrated the launch of its Haswell architecture with a party put on by Intel's Hillsboro team up in DuPont, Washington. Though our editorial staff was split between recovering from a month of product introductions and preparing for Computex, we had a game enthusiast on-site to snap pictures and report.
Intel sponsors many LANFests each year, and this time around the event just so happened to coincide with the processor introduction. So, at midnight on Saturday, the attendees made their way down the hall to go hands-on with Haswell.
CyberPowerPC, Digital Storm, and Maingear all helped put on the event.
CyberPower had 10 of its Gamer Xtreme 4000s there, all with Core i7-4770Ks, GeForce GTX 770s, and Cooler Master cases.
Digital Storm chipped in 10 of its Vanquish boxes, armed with Core i5-4670Ks, GeForce GTX 650 Tis, and Corsair H60 closed-loop coolers.
Finally, Maingear contributed a Shift and a Vybe, both with Core i5s.
All of the reseller systems were running games, including Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Tomb Raider, BioShock: Infinite, Grid 2, and Metro: Last Light.
Intel had an overclocking enthusiast on-hand to demonstrate the potential of Core i7-4770K using Cooler Master’s Seidon 120 XL closed-loop liquid cooler. His purpose wasn’t just max-load stability, like what you see in our motherboard round-ups. Rather, he was showing different aspects of the new platform’s overclocking attributes. He got the BCLK up to 137 MHz, for example. He hit a high-frequency ceiling of 5.24 GHz on all cores, and a full-load ceiling of 4.85 GHz. Switching the emphasis to graphics, a 1600 MHz engine clock managed respectable frame rates at 1080p in some mainstream titles like Call of Duty, League of Legends, and Portal 2.
There was plenty of food to eat; the cupcakes were a particularly popular hit.
The crowd was both large and diverse. Young and old were there to get their hands dirty with technology and learn more about hardware. It was truly a good opportunity for tech enthusiasts from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia to get involved.
