| BlueFalcon said: Early Feb? You'll be just months away from Haswell, Socket 1150 motherboard, and even possibly HD8000/GTX700 series GPUs. It would really be a shame to buy IVB CPU with Haswell launching in April! Also, if your budget is $1,200-1,500, it would mean either HD7970/GTX680 which will be a huge waste of $ at that point given their near EOL situation or going with dual-GPUs which isn't ideal since it's possible next GTX780 could end up being a beast. :)
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Haswell will only be an incremental performance increase over Ivy Bridge, just like Ivy Bridge was only incremental over Sandy Bridge. - You're looking at 10-15% performance improvement tops.
The advantage with haswell should be dropping TDP's at idle.
The only interesting part about Haswell IMHO will be if Intel ditches the idea of using cheap thermal paste which limited the overclocks in Ivy Bridge.
Besides Haswell will be more expensive than Ivy Bridge for a fair while as it uses a completely new platform and hence you will pay the early adopter tax on both the motherboard and processor.
As for the Geforce 700 and Radeon 8000 series, again. It will only be incremental, about the equivalent in jump between the Radeon 5000 to the 6000 series or the jump between the Geforce 400 to 500 series.
It's on the same manufacturing node, but they will be increasing die sizes by about 20-25% which is where you will get your improved performance from, coupled with architectural and driver improvements of course.
Don't expect anything like double the performance and historically it takes months for GPU prices to settle anyway.
I say, buy the best you can afford now, always something better around the corner, it's not like your PC suddenly won't be able to play games when the yearly refreshes are released.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
