Finally doing it!

[Ruuke]

So my 4 year old workstation stopped booting this morning, and my wife gave the okay, so I ordered the parts for my return to SFF this afternoon and hope to start on the build this Tuesday if everything arrives on time.

Here's what I ended up with:
i7 4770k
Asrock Z87E-ITX
EVGA GTX670 SC 2GB (already own)
16GB Kingston HyperX Beast DDR3-2400
Crucial M550 512GB SSD (OS & Games)
Corsair H75 CLC
Fractal Design Node 304 (White)
Silverstone ST55F-G 550W 140mm PSU + PP05-E Flat SFF Cable Set

Pulling over a couple of big HDDs from my old station for my bulk media storage and video work. I'm looking forward to this build since I haven't messed with a small machine since I built a M-ATX Antec Aria with an Athlon XP 1800+ in high school.

Might throw up some pics as I go along if there's interest.

 

[SilkySalamandr]

Congrats man but with one question. With the Haswell refresh coming probably this week or next, could you not wait just a little? I ask because this is whats holding up my "upgrade" from a 2600k I been rockin for 3 years. The refresh will have just a 100mhz speed bump but will have improved thermal compound process because I guess Haswell was a hot one. But I completely understand since you said its your workstation so you need to be back online with the quickness.

With the refresh minimal, If Im a week off from getting the "newest" to raise the resale value a little down the road I guess I will.

Edit, Looks like the K products will be released later then the non K ones. Looks like ill just grab a 4770k and call it a day!

My black and red NZXT H440 has been patiently waiting...

 

[Phuncz]

I believe the refresh K-series are for June-July and how that "improved thermal compound" will turn out, we'll have to wait and see. It's like you said, a 100MHz bump meaning about a 2.5% increase for waiting more than 2 months. The price has also marginally decreased over the past year, meaning you will probably pay more than you get for the two unnoticeable changes.

About the build, it seems solid. I would have advised Very Low Profile memory if you weren't going to overclock (I suspect you do) but since the price for VLP memory has corrected itself, the modules you choose seem to be a good fit. I have the same motherboard and RAM clearance should only be a problem with air cooling and certain weird CLC blocks.

 

[Zap]

Well, his computer is dead, so he probably can't wait 2 months unless he has another system to use in the interim. His sig shows a laptop, so maybe?

For the OP, do you need Hyperthreading? For gaming duties a Core i5 should be much faster than your old i7-920 from your sig, and the extra four fake cores don't do much for games.

 

[Phuncz]

His "old" i7-920 is no slouch, you should read through this review and you'll notice that it won't matter more than 10% (mostly less than 5%) on the same GPU but upgrading to Haswell.

The time that every year your CPU was outdated, has been long gone since Intel started with the Core-CPU's. Progress has been mainly on power efficiency.

 

[Ruuke]

It is my primary production workstation for my home business, as well as my video encoding workstation for volunteer projects and such so I couldn't afford to wait too long.

As for going with the i7 over i5 my experience between my wife's i5 and my 920 has been that it is worth it to have the hyper-threading for Handbrake use. I use Handbrake for most of my personal encoding work. Hoping I can get a solid 4.2GHz OC on it to use consistently, though running stock is not going to make me super disappointed. I just don't want to have to run with my case side off all the time to hold a decent OC as with the old machine.

I was running at 3.6GHz most of the time so the gaming aspect really shouldn't change much if at all, was having no problem being CPU bound.