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
Test System and Comments –Intel’s latest CPU requires a new socket and chipset. Both of these are accomplished with the new Z87 chipset and the LGA1150 socket. You are losing 5 pins from the last socket which is an interesting trade off over the last few generations (1156, 1155 and now 1150). For our tests we went with Asus’ Z87- Expert board. It is not the top of the line Asus, but it represents a solid base for performance with the Core i7 4770k CPU we are using as our test sample. You can see the rest of the specs below.
Comments -For our first run we will be testing with Windows 7 x64 with service pack one. We decided to us Windows 7 instead of Windows 8 because Windows 7 is a much more common OS. We will be taking a look at how the Core i7 4770k performs with Windows 8 in a later review.
