Intel Core i7 4770K “Haswell” Processor Review

The build-up to the launch of Intel’s fourth generation of core processors, codename Haswell, has been extensive. To my recollection this has got to be one of the most publicized launches to date, and expectations have been set very high for Intel’s new processors. In this article today we are looking to cover one specific thing, as the title suggests, which is the Core i7 4770K. This will be the flagship of Intel’s new Haswell based LGA 1150 platform, which is not backwards compatible with LGA 1155 in any way, but does succeed the LGA 1155 platform.

The Core i7 4770K and other desktop Haswell processors are a very small part of the Haswell “portfolio”. Haswell has really been designed for the mobile notebook and tablet markets, with power consumption and battery life in mind. Despite this power optimisation, the desktop variants have still been tweaked and tuned to provide more performance in addition to power savings. Intel’s Core i7 4770K boasts a stock clock speed of 3.5GHz, with 3.9GHz Turbo and 8MB of shared L3 cache. The Core i7 4770K supports dual channel memory at 1600MHz and has 18 PCI Express lanes integrated onto its main controller. The Core i7 4770K is recommended for the Z87 platform which we aren’t covering here but there will be extensive coverage of it throughout our Z87 motherboard reviews.

Haswell features a totally redesigned 22nm architecture using tri-gate 3-D transistors and a dramatically redesigned integrated graphics component which offers significant performance boosts over previous generation Intel Core series CPUs. The die size of the quad core Core i7 4770K is 177 millimeters squared and it features 1.4 billion transistors.

We aren’t going to get into any more details for this introduction but we will proceed to do that throughout the course of this review as well as giving you performance numbers and power consumption figures. So let’s proceed to see how good Intel’s new flagship Core i7 4770K really is.