Intel i7-920 x58 vs Haswell @1080p and above - Still no urgency to upgrade?

Boggins said:
ARMA2/ARMA3 would be my main reason for upgrading. Your framerates on a single 680 made that big of a difference? My 580s in SLI are not being fully utilized, but neither does any single CPU core. That game engine baffles me.
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FYI, ArmA 2 only works with single cards. You get worse FPS if SLI or Xfire was enabled.
 
Shantarr.Dalrae said:
Just want to drop in here that I went from a 920 @ 4.0 (asus p6t) to a 3770K @ 4.5 and my FPS in ARMA2 engine nearly doubled.

It was a life altering experience for me. For the price I paid at microcenter for the cpu. Very, very worth it.

With haswell out, I have to say it is worth it at that price point and there is very little reason NOT to do it.

Edit: Not to mention a free upgrade on my SSD gaining nearly 70% throughput on the SATAIII interface.
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Interesting, one of the main reasons why i might upgrade to IB-E is ArmA2/3.


Mr. Stryker said:
FYI, ArmA 2 only works with single cards. You get worse FPS if SLI or Xfire was enabled.
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ArmA 2 supports and works with multiple video cards. But the scaling isn't the best.
 
I'm in the same position sort of, where I'm running an i7-870 that I can run fairly reliably at 4GHz, but my motherboard has been a bit wonky lately. Not horrible, but just weird losing of my system drive at times.

I'm seriously wondering whether to just find an 1156/p55 motherboard on ebay or something to replace it (since they've all been discontinued except for apparently Biostar boards).
 
I'm not buying it.. i tested BF 3 MP with 64 playes last night @ 1920 x 1080 in Ultra settings and my i7-930 is set to 3.8hz (HT is off) with the ram around 1465mhz and PCI Express payload size is set to 128mb my HD 7950 is set to 1002/1503 and the game was butter smooth so i have to call BS on that.. also ran Crysis 3 on both very high and high , as it was butter smooth on high and alittle slugglish on very high but ran it and could be tweaked.. high was maxed out which very high was also and it was more the video card then the x58 platform so Haswell has notting for me i need other then alittle power savings .
 
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fanboy said:
I'm not buying it.. i tested BF 3 MP with 64 playes last night @ 1920 x 1080 in Ultra settings and my i7-930 is set to 3.8hz (HT is off) with the ram around 1465mhz and PCI Express payload size is set to 128mb my HD 7950 is set to 1002/1503 and the game was butter smooth so i have to call BS on that.. also ran Crysis 3 on both very high and high , as it was butter smooth on high and alittle slugglish on very high but ran it and could be tweaked.. high was maxed out which very high was also and it was more the video card then the x58 platform so Haswell has notting for me i need other then alittle power savings .
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Smooth on ultra settings? Really? I HIGHLY doubt it was smooth the entire time unless you are running with Ambient Occlusion off, Motion blur (which it should be), and AA/AF off.

I had a 7970 clocked to 1300//1750 w/ 4.9ghz 2600k and I would dip down into the 40's.
 
It shows the settings in the video i linked and everything you said is on, i can't totally play because i was holding the iPhone with my letf hand.. with BF 3 you have to turn off HT and i have the payload set to 128mb.
 
I have HT off... No need to have it on, just creates heat for gaming.

And with an overclocked 7970 you cant play it smooth 100% of the time even at 1080p with all the eye candy. I can assure you that your 3.8ghz i7-930 w/ a 7950 isnt faster.
 
I never said it was faster,, i said it played smooth in ultra settings without shutting and i forgot to say i use Vista 64bit and that is Cat 13.1
 
WeaponX said:
I believe my case is completely unique. I don't know any players that I play Black Ops 2 with that actually runs at 144mhz refresh + GTX 690. When you're a hardcore FPS player, ever frame counts so in essence you want the fastest and smoothest frames possible. So when I went from my 4.2ghz 920 DO to a 4.6ghz 3770K there was a very noticeable difference. I was almost hitting the 200 fps ceiling constantly no matter where I was whereas with the 920 I would be hovering around the 180 fps and sometimes hitting 200 fps in small areas. I get accused of cheating constantly if that's anything.
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There is no discernible difference between 180 and 200 fps on a 144hz refresh rate. Notice it's hz and not MHz - hz is just a unit of measurement on cyclical processes. One hertz is one cycle per second.

Now that's out of the way, the maximum framerate a 144hz screen can produce is 144 FPS. Straightforward enough.

So, that difference you noticed between the Nehalem and Ivy was all in your head and not in reality.
 
I would believe that an overclocked i7-920 is still very capable.
I find that the only downside is the outdated features of the X78 motherboard (no native USB3, Sata 3, PCI3, etc.).
 
It's x58 socket 1366.. it has features the newer models don't like triple channel DDR 3 memory contorler to which mine is running and when in SLi or CX it's full x16 by x16 on 2.0 and not x8 by x8 ,,so it depends on what you want,, i'm running a WD Black 7200rpm hardrive with 32Mb buffer so just an SSD would be an upgraded at sata 2
 
fanboy said:
It's x58 socket 1366.. it has features the newer models don't like triple channel DDR 3 memory contorler to which mine is running and when in SLi or CX it's full x16 by x16 on 2.0 and not x8 by x8 ,,so it depends on what you want,, i'm running a WD Black 7200rpm hardrive with 32Mb buffer so just an SSD would be an upgraded at sata 2
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Triple channel DDR3 provides no real performance benefits, and PCI 2.0 at 16x isn't that different in bandwidth compared to PC 3.0 at 8x. Furthermore, neither can be fully utilized by any GPU.

The real native 6gbps SATAs of Z87 will provide real benefits for SSDs however.
 
Well I just threw in a 4770K to replace my 920, it's absolutely destroying my 920 in Firefall (that game is heavily CPU bound). Still working on the clocks but sitting on 4.5ghz atm.
 
My I7-950 with 2 480 SLI still holding strong. I game at 2560x1440. I am running Sata 6 on my Asus Formula III / and rocking my USB 3.0 on the board.

Waiting for Ivy-E.
 
Here are two video i made playing BF3

i7-920 and gtx 480 sli played at 1920 x 1200. Recording the video dropped about 5-8 fps

@4.2 ghz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KWk-RsRLgk

@4.4 ghz ( i had just updated the drivers and that version gave me problems)
plenty of info on this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpqwsMter3A

i7-920 is still a very good cpu. I also have some crysis 3 videos if you guys want to see them
 
Its incredibly easy to see the 920@4Ghz+ still does not bottleneck most games (as in 98%+) at medium to higher resolutions.

There is only ONE game and its pretty old I still play that does have a fractional bottleneck, Supreme Commander Forged alliance. Not well multi-threaded and clearly maxes one core while the other cores are lightly utilised (large map Multiple ALX AI) I am talking sim speed not FPS.

Newer games such as Crysis 3, Borderlands 2 etc , clearly are not bottlenecked by any single core and the GPU is the bottleneck.

Can't justify a upgrade for a small to modest bump on one game.
 
Well, if anyone wants to see my i7-920 @ 4.09GHz power two GTX 780s in SLi, please suggest some good, free benchmarks that we could then ideally compare to some Haswell numbers. Though I respect and largely agree with [H]'s stance on benchmark, for our purposes here, the more "canned" and easily replicable, the better. Ya know, like old school "timedemos" used to be.

--H
 
Hurin said:
Well, if anyone wants to see my i7-920 @ 4.09GHz power two GTX 780s in SLi, please suggest some good, free benchmarks that we could then ideally compare to some Haswell numbers. Though I respect and largely agree with [H]'s stance on benchmark, for our purposes here, the more "canned" and easily replicable, the better. Ya know, like old school "timedemos" used to be.

--H
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Man I would love to see any benchmarks or possible a video upload gaming something like crysis 3 or BF3. Any 3DMark benchmark should be awesome!

I still think the 920 is a beast.
 
I decided to do the upgrade.

I went from a i7 930 at 4.3GHz to a i7 4770K at 4.6GHz. Pretty big difference for me in some cases. For example Guild Wars 2. In the heavy world vs world and boss fights I went from 18fps with the 930 to 30fps with the 4770K. Also in less intensive battles it's gone from 40fps to 60fps. These are very noticeable improvements.

Also less noticeable buy still really nice. I went form minimum FPs of around 70 in BF3 in 64 player server battles to never seeing under 100fps anymore. This is nice for my 120Hz monitor.

Also this thing uses so much less power at idle and load and idles so much cooler.

And finally, not to mention my SSD doubled in speed moving from SATA 2 to SATA 3.

I paid $600 for the new cpu, mobo, and ram and sold my old X58 trio for $200 so the upgrade was $400. Well worth it IMO. I had the 930 for 3 years and now I plan to keep this 4770K for 3 years again until skymont probably.
 
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My wife is a big Guild Wars 2 player; she was using my i7 920 @ 4.0 and a GTX 580. We build her a 4770k (stock speed/cooler currently) and moved the 580 to it. A week later I bought a 780 for my i7 920. Her PC, stock with the 580, is solidly faster at 2560x1440 than my 920 @ 4.0 with the 780. So, games that don't thread too well will shine on Haswell.

Most other games (bioshock infinite, metro LL) seem to run much better on my 920 with the faster GPU so unless you are playing GW2-type games, a GPU upgrade may be a better bet.
 
sphinx99 said:
My wife is a big Guild Wars 2 player; she was using my i7 920 @ 4.0 and a GTX 580. We build her a 4770k (stock speed/cooler currently) and moved the 580 to it. A week later I bought a 780 for my i7 920. Her PC, stock with the 580, is solidly faster at 2560x1440 than my 920 @ 4.0 with the 780. So, games that don't thread too well will shine on Haswell.

Most other games (bioshock infinite, metro LL) seem to run much better on my 920 with the faster GPU so unless you are playing GW2-type games, a GPU upgrade may be a better bet.
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Hi sphinx99,

Just a question about your playing at 2560x1440 with guild wars 2. Was the game running better because of poor threading for guild wars 2? While properly threaded games run at par if slight better on the 920?

I was under the assumption that anything higher than 1920x1200, you will be GPU limited and the performance will be pretty much the same with same family line "socket 1366" with CPUs that can accommodate the threads. PCI Express 2.0 vs PCI Express 3.0?
 
Guild Wars 2 is the only game we play that is CPU-limited on my 920. Frankly we think it is CPU-limited on the 4770k under certain conditions as well.

Everything else feels GPU-limited and moving from the 580 to the 780 made a huge difference on my 4+ year old PC. I was surprised by this.
 
Yeah, even with my 4770K at 4.6GHz GW2 is still heavily CPU limited constantly for me. I mainly play in world vs world where there are 100 players all on screen at once.

You can see as more and more people join the battle the FPS drops down to 30 or sometimes even lower on my 4770K. I have a GTX 680 as well and you can see the GPU usage drop lower and lower and more people come onto the screen, because the CPU can't keep up and is able to prepare less and less frames for the GPU to render.

It was much worse on my 4.3GHz i7 930 though, nearly 50% worse even.

The only time I see my 680 at 99% GPU usage in GW2 is when I'm out in the world and pretty much alone and am then getting nearly 200FPS.

In World vs World, my GPU I'm sure could render at least 100FPS, but my CPU says nope, I can't update 100 players 100 times per second.

BF3 was usually CPU limited for me too with my GTX 680, but the CPU limit is still so high that it doesnt really matter. With the 4.3GHz 930 I was seeing 70-100FPS on the 930 and just upgrading the CPU to the 4.6GHz 4770K I see 100-200FPS now, so the CPU was technically always bottlenecking the GPU.

In single-player games the GPU is nearly alwauys the bottleneck. In high player count multi player (which for me is nearly all I play) the CPU is almost always the bottleneck in my experience. It's just not easy to thread updating dozens of networked players on screen at once. It's nearly always a single threaded operation.
 
Eriksrocks said:
In the same boat, with the difference being that I occasionally do a lot of video/graphics work on the side, in addition to gaming, so raw CPU performance does show itself.

Ugh, this is a hard decision...
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For you..I would say do it..or wait for IB-E..or is it Haswell-E? hmm
However for gaming/daily stuff..x58 will handle anything quite well still.
Too bad there aren't 6-core Haswell CPUs.
Me..I think I wanna play with Clarkbars :D
 
I'm just going wait myself and if AMD gets there frame pacing driver then maybe add another 7950 or maybe an 8000 .. as i been running at @ stock settings for awhile it's at 3.8Ghz now and feels like an upgrade to me already.
 
SirMaster said:
Yeah, even with my 4770K at 4.6GHz GW2 is still heavily CPU limited constantly for me. I mainly play in world vs world where there are 100 players all on screen at once.

You can see as more and more people join the battle the FPS drops down to 30 or sometimes even lower on my 4770K. I have a GTX 680 as well and you can see the GPU usage drop lower and lower and more people come onto the screen, because the CPU can't keep up and is able to prepare less and less frames for the GPU to render.

It was much worse on my 4.3GHz i7 930 though, nearly 50% worse even.

The only time I see my 680 at 99% GPU usage in GW2 is when I'm out in the world and pretty much alone and am then getting nearly 200FPS.

In World vs World, my GPU I'm sure could render at least 100FPS, but my CPU says nope, I can't update 100 players 100 times per second.

BF3 was usually CPU limited for me too with my GTX 680, but the CPU limit is still so high that it doesnt really matter. With the 4.3GHz 930 I was seeing 70-100FPS on the 930 and just upgrading the CPU to the 4.6GHz 4770K I see 100-200FPS now, so the CPU was technically always bottlenecking the GPU.

In single-player games the GPU is nearly alwauys the bottleneck. In high player count multi player (which for me is nearly all I play) the CPU is almost always the bottleneck in my experience. It's just not easy to thread updating dozens of networked players on screen at once. It's nearly always a single threaded operation.
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I REALLY have my doubts about GW3, what resolution are you playing in?.

http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html


Can you post a screenshot of your current CPU usage during GW3 from either Task manager or perfmon, be interesting to see if any cores are even close to maxed or its just another game engine that cant handle so much going on.
 
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Battleneter2 said:
I REALLY have my doubts about GW3, what resolution are you playing in?.

http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html


Can you post a screenshot of your current CPU usage during GW3 from either Task manager or perfmon, be interesting to see if any cores are even close to maxed or its just another game engine that cant handle so much going on.
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It really is just that the game engine is mostly single threaded and can't handle much going on.

If you stay out of world vs world huge Zerg groups I easily stay above 60fps or so. It's just that the engine is only a modified version of the 2005 Guild Wars 1 engine and that game was not made for many players at once. I play it at 1080p, but it doesn't matter. 1024x768 all low runs no faster in these cases.

The engin me just doesn't scale and when you have so many players the fps just gets brought to its knees.

I could capture the CPU usage, but it wouldn't really show much. You can simply see that overclocking the CPU increases the frame rate in those heavy situations linearly. Absolute single core performance is all that matters in that game for archiving the highest minimum frame rate possible. The huge ~30% IPC increase of haswell over nehalem plus the extra 300MHz I got leads to some large gains in a situation like this.
 
can you upload a quick vid of your frames in GW2? im looking at upgrading to haswell for that game too.
 
sphinx99 said:
My wife is a big Guild Wars 2 player; she was using my i7 920 @ 4.0 and a GTX 580. We build her a 4770k (stock speed/cooler currently) and moved the 580 to it. A week later I bought a 780 for my i7 920. Her PC, stock with the 580, is solidly faster at 2560x1440 than my 920 @ 4.0 with the 780. So, games that don't thread too well will shine on Haswell.

Most other games (bioshock infinite, metro LL) seem to run much better on my 920 with the faster GPU so unless you are playing GW2-type games, a GPU upgrade may be a better bet.
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can you upload a vid of your frames in GW2? im planning on upgrading to it for that game too.
 
I'll see what I can do tonight. It's WvW night for our guild so I should be able to get some footage of big zerg battles there. And also the main world chest events.
 
I bought the bullet and went to a Haswell (Rig in sig below) I went from a 6 core 980x to a 4770k. I was blown away by some of the differences in the two CPU's. Windows 8 still boots very fast. I can mainly tell the difference in the programs I use: Maya3D works really well, as does Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects. Battlefield 3 got a very nice boost. I had a baseline fps of around 55-65fps on Noshar Canals on 64 player team death match with my 980x. After I upgraded to Haswell, my baseline score jumped to 80-85 fps on the same map with the same number of people.

Gonna play with the overclocking this weekend.
 
Intel really needs to speed up their enthusiast timetable.

IB-E is going to be released in September and Haswell-E next year, along with the X99 chipset.

So right now, the 'enthusiast' platform has an outdated chipset (X79 - only 2 sata3 ports) and is always one step behind the latest mainstream release.

i7 920 @ 3.8Ghz here, just itching to jump to LGA2011...
 
silencer51 said:
Intel really needs to speed up their enthusiast timetable.

IB-E is going to be released in September and Haswell-E next year, along with the X99 chipset.

So right now, the 'enthusiast' platform has an outdated chipset (X79 - only 2 sata3 ports) and is always one step behind the latest mainstream release.

i7 920 @ 3.8Ghz here, just itching to jump to LGA2011...
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I have been really pleased with the performance so far from Haswell 4770k. I had the upgrade itch, so I scratched it. I was waiting for IB-E to hatch, but I will wait for Haswell-E next year.
 
I went from a I7-920 at 4.0ghz to a haswell 4770k at 4.5ghz.

The difference was not worth the upgrade for game performance...at all.

however - this new setup idles at MUCH less power, and now I have USB support (with no USB equipment yet) --- otherwise - yea...If I could do it again I'd just save my money.

My 3dmark score raised very minimally with the same hardware outside of RAM/CPU/MB. See screenprint

For the screenprint my I7-920 was running at 3.8ghz (my min voltage/decent o/c setting) - w/ 12GB RAM running at 1333MHz cas latency 8
My 4770k was running with the OC Genie profile at 4.2ghz - 16GB RAM running at 1600MHz cas latency 9

3dmark score of 6172 (4770K setup) vs. 3dmark score of 5741 (I7-920 setup)
That's with the same GTX-670 (stock clocked) and same everything else in the case.

I dare to say with the I7-920 at 4.2ghz (if it were possible) the gap would be insignificant - it's arguably insignificant anyway.

xue8p.jpg
 
I jumped to the i5 4670K from my 950/970 setup and I definitely saw an increase in the smoothness of the gameplay in BF3. The minimum FPS is a lot more solid than dipping badly during heavy gunfights on 64 player maps.
 
Archaea said:
I went from a I7-920 at 4.0ghz to a haswell 4770k at 4.5ghz.

The difference was not worth the upgrade for game performance...at all.

*snip*
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Thanks for the post and, most importantly, the numbers.

I'm really finding it hard to believe that a i7-920 at 4+GHz is really holding anything up compared to Haswell. And it would seem that your numbers (even though it's "just" 3DMark) would bear that skepticism out.

So far the actual numbers posted have tended to indicate that the CPU upgrade would be largely wasted. Whereas those posting about a dramatic increase have generally depended on assertions and their subjective sense of what "seems" faster. And though I've said this before, I'll say it again, I have seen far too many people declare something to be much faster or slower based on their hopes or their fears. . . when in reality, objective testing shows that their perception is actually way off.

Just the decision to determine if things are faster can influence your perception of whether something is indeed faster. When, in reality, prior to the CPU/MB upgrade, had someone told you the CPU and MB had been upgraded (when it had not) and then shown some gameplay on the unchanged system, many, many people would swear they notice dramatic improvement. That's just the nature of human perception. Our brains aren't trustworthy when we aren't comparing things side-by-side, apples to apples, at the same time.

Not that we've had enough real data either way to say anything definitively either way, of course. But that's the trend so far I think.

--H
 
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