For all the hardcore tech enthusiasts out there that are eagerly awaiting news of Intel’s upcoming Haswell line of processors, you will be pleased to know detailed performance results have finally been revealed. Intel’s Core i7 4770K will be the next flagship CPU from Intel based on the next generation architecture, codename Haswell. Haswell represents a redesign of the 22nm architecture or a “tock” in Intel’s tick-tock model.
Traditionally we have seen tech sites get access to exclusive performance previews, well ahead of NDAs, based on engineering samples and last year we saw Anandtech do it with Ivy Bridge. Now Tom’s Hardware have had the chance to do it with Haswell.
As expected the performance of Haswell is very good in comparison to Ivy Bridge giving about 7-15% more performance depending on the application. Below you can see the i7 4770K versus the i7 3770K, i7 2700K and i7 3970X to get an estimate of how the Haswell flagship deals with the rest of the Intel competiton. Unfortunately, AMD were excluded from the testing but given the really high performance nature of these tests it is unlikely that the FX 8350 would of been able to keep up anyway.
First up, 3ds Max gives us an idea of the kind of rendering performance that the i7 4770K will have. As you can see it is clearly better than the i7 3770K but just can’t match the extra 2 cores on the i7 3970X.
Handbrake gives you an idea of what the encoding performance is like and we can see the i7 4770K knocking on the door of the i7 3970X – really impressive stuff here.
Again Visual Studio 2010 shows similarly impressive results with the i7 4770K halving the gap between Ivy Bridge and the very expensive (and power hungry) Sandy Bridge-E platform.
Multi-threaded blender performance shows about 7% extra performance over the i7 3770K but not enough extra clock-per-clock performance is present to catch the 6 cores on the i7 3970X.
If you make considerations for single core single threaded clock-per-clock performance then we can see Haswell’s i7 4770K manages only an extra 3% performance over Ivy Bridge.
Gaming performance is something Intel have started to take more seriously and we can see that in the evolution of the graphics from HD 4000 to HD 4600. Dirt Showdown shows some really excellent gains although you can still see we are quite some way off 1080p gaming at low/medium quality settings.
Hitman Absolution showed less impressive scaling so we can see that the Haswell GPU performance will vary significantly between titles. The general rule of thumb still seems to be that anything above 1366 by 768 is unplayable and if you use a monitor of that resolution with this CPU then it is almost criminal! Most people who buy an i7 4770K will be pairing a discrete GPU with it, especially if they are gaming.
So there you have it, a performance preview of the Intel Core i7 4770K courtesy of Tom’s Hardware. If you want some extra detail then be sure to head on over to check the full preview out.
Most high end i5 & i7 chips are paired with a discreet GPU. It makes me wonder why Intel always bother to include their top of the line iGPU in the package. All it serves to do is drive the price up. As a gamer I wish they’d remove it altogether. But alas…
i completely agree with this. it’s daft having an iGPU on a CPU that will almost definitely have a dedicated GPU. it means Mobo Manufacturers can save money on USB3 ports and put in a DVI, HDMI and even a VGA (who the hell uses’s VGA other than crazy enthusiast overclockers?!?). i mean, sure, the architecture runs off a ring bus so removing the iGPU might have an adverse affect on timings but this in Intel… it wont take much for them to work around that.
i do actually use a lot the iGPU from my 2500K, i buy and sell gpus constantly, forcing me to not have a dedicated gpu, they work for some casual gaming while getting another dedicated gpu.