The Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn

Test Setup And Benchmarks

As we were planning out our test platforms, MSI responded to a call for vendor consistency across the motherboards we wanted to use. The company sent us one board for each of the processor interfaces we planned to compare, making it easy to tune each firmware exactly the same way. In this case, we wanted all power-saving features turned on and all automatic overclocking capabilities turned off (including settings that pushed all cores to the maximum Turbo Boost setting).

The first platform we set up centered on the 990FXA-GD80 board and FX-8350 processor. Four 4 GB DDR3-1600 memory modules from G.Skill populated the motherboard's slots, while a Samsung 840 Pro attached to its first SATA 6Gb/s port.

Next, we configured MSI's FM2-A85XA-G65 using the same drive image, complementing the platform with AMD's highest-end A10-5800K APU. While a number of our earlier benchmarks exploited the chip's on-die Radeon HD 7660D, everything from here on out leverages an Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan.

With the AMD testing out of the way, we were able to start configuring Intel-based systems. We started with the Z87 Mpower Max, which glows yellow up top and white underneath. To be quite honest, I haven't been so impressed with an MSI motherboard in a long time. The company appears to have really stepped up its game for the 8-series generation.

The Z77 Mpower board serves our LGA 1155 needs, hosting Intel's Core i7-3770K and -2700K, yielding comparisons to two prior-generation architectures.

I want to point out something MSI did for us leading into this launch. Like pretty much every motherboard vendor out there, it has a setting in its BIOS called Enhanced Turbo. This sets all four cores to operate at the processor's maximum single-core Turbo Boost ratio as a sort of sneaky overclock. At our request, MSI turned this off by default with its 8-series boards so that Haswell-based CPUs operate according to Intel's specification.

We had to turn this quiet "cheat" off manually on the Z77 Mpower and Z79A-GD45 Plus, below. However, we appreciated that MSI was willing to get back to Intel's spec for this generation. We prefer control over this, and to not have it be a default setting.

Finally, theX79A-GD45 Plus hosted our venerable Core i7-3930K processor. Old though it might be, this is still one of our favorite CPUs around. And as you'll see, the old timer has no trouble beating Haswell down in threaded apps able to exploit its six cores.

Noctua sent over its LGA 1150-compatible NH-U14S to help with testing, too. We used an NF-F12 fan to blow over our memory modules. This seemed to help put a stop to the errors we were getting in our long, taxing Visual Studio compile workload.

Corsair also sent over some hardware for us to use. We leaned on its AX860i power supply for its promised compatibility with Haswell's low-power states. We also used its CMY16GX3M2A2400C10R memory kit for our overclocking efforts.