Editor’s Note – We delayed our release of the Haswell review due to some performance issues we saw with some of our tests. We reached out to Intel and all of the companies that provide our testing software to ensure that our numbers were accurate. We did find that at least Sisoft’s SANDRA suite needed to address the use of the AVX2 instructions in Haswell. We are also in the process of validating LightWave 11 for use in the lab (and other new tests). Additionally we removed the gaming tests from this review, due to problems encountered with the updated games we are using. We intended to publish our gaming tests at a later date. This should help show off Haswell and the new Z87 chipset in a better light than some of the current tests. So without further commentary lets dive into our Haswell review
Overclocking -It seems that each new generation of Intel CPUs brings new overclocking challenges and Haswell is no different. As with Ivy Bridge there are temperature issues to consider when overclocking and now you also have to deal with voltages to the CPU cache. This makes getting a high clock speed tricky, but not impossible. We were able to hit 5GHz very easily, but it was nowhere near stable. We ended up having to back things off to get a bench stable overclock of 4.8GHz. This is not yet a 24/7 clock as we have not put it under the stress of prime or another intensive application, but it does meet the requirement of running all of our internal benched back-to-back without any errors.
The temperatures that we saw were not bad although, to be honest, we expected better as Haswell is a more mature 22nm CPU. Idle temps were taken after 30 minutes of operationn with no applicatons running other than background proesses. We used CoreTemp and Asus AISuite III to mesure them. Load temperatures were taken at loop 23 of a 32M HyperPi run (100% CPU on all cores for around 10 Minutes).
