Building my first PC and would like some input

[Pemalite]

BlueFalcon said:

Pemalite said:

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.

Ivy Bridge is just a refresh+, meaning most of the performance increases came through a 3-4% increase in IPC, a slight bump in clocks/Turbo Boost and performance gain on the GPU side. Haswell is not the same as SB--> IVB since it's actually a significantly revised microarchitecture. It will be more like moving from Nehalem to Sandy Bridge. While you are most likely right that IPC will only move 10-15%, there are potential larger upsides in Haswell. Although I agree with you that if you consider anything less than 2x the performance increase marginal, then of course Haswell is not a revolutionary upgrade like going from 2006 Q6600 to the 2012 i7 3770K would be.

IMO, the best time to upgrade CPUs on the Intel side is on the TOCKs because that's when 90% of the advanced architecture tech gets introduced, while refreshes is just a die shrink with minor changes. In the last 6 years most of the refreshes from Intel have been disappointing, especially Westmere and Ivy Bridge. For that reason there is little reason to wait for Broadwell in 2014 as Haswell should have 90% of the performance boost that Broadwill will bring.

Well. Lets be honest, most of Haswell's improvements are focused on integration and lowering TDP's.
From an architectural stand point they are merely widening the front end to better feed the chip, it's almost the same kind of thing we saw moving from the i7 990X to the i7 3960X.
Just with a few new instructions thrown in, it's hardly a revolutionary change from an overall architectural perspective.
And this was the kind of performance improvement we got: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/443?vs=142&i=2.5.3.4.6.25.26.27.28.29.30.31.32.33.34.35.36.37.38.39.40.41.42.43.45.46.53.54.55.334.61.62

As for the new instructions, it will take years for Developers to start using them, heck they still haven't even made SSE4.1 a standard for most applications that consumers use despite that releasing 6ish years ago, they just don't want to lock out consumers.
Intel even stated themselves they will only be incrementally increasing performance when they moved to a "No-Surprises" strategy, which so far has remained pretty accurate.

I'm still running on Sandy-Bridge-E and I'll probably upgrade to Ivy Bridge-E, but nothing has brought down my Core i7 3930K @ 4.8ghz yet and nothing will for years to come.

Remember how allot of AMD enthusiasts were telling people to hold off upgrading for Bulldozer? Look how that turned out, if we waited every single time we would still be running on the origional Pentium or AMD K6/2 or lord-forbid Cyrix.

Haswell is targeted to launch in March-June 2013, that's provided there is no delays, 3-6 months of not gaming at maximum quality settings is a bloody long time IMHO.