Two Intel 4th Gen Haswell new build questions

[Staxxx]

Thanks to all the forum members who are helping me with my new build. This should be of interest to persons who are planning a high-end HTPC build also. My use is mainly high-level photo editing and I am also not interested in over-clocking.

The availability of motherboards and CPUs based on the Haswell processors are going to get better this month. But given the restricted offerings at the moment (at the one or two small online shops I have checked), I have a couple of questions. These questions are also because I cannot find appropriate reviews as yet or if they are available, I am not able to understand them.

1. My choices regarding CPUs are either the Intel i7 4770 at Rs. 19,000 (overkill as I do not need an i7 machine) or the i5 4430 at Rs 12,000. The latter is a basic CPU but I am not clear, as I cannot understand the specs, whether this is adequate for my purposes. The advantage of the latter is that with the difference in the price I could get myself a basic graphic card.
If the suggestion is to wait, then which 4th gen i5 should I wait for? The 4570r looks sweet as it has an IRIS GPU on-board, but I am not sure when it will be available and at what price.

2. Which Z87 based motherboard to go for? There seems to be two budget offerings at the moment. The Intel DH87RL which is about Rs. 7,000 and the Asus Z87 (basic model) Rs. 11,000. I cannot understand the differences in the specs and what I will be giving up with the basic Intel board.

Apparently the Haswell chips perform very well and run cool and efficiently at base speeds and overclocking them leads to various issues with over-heating etc. This is a moot point as I do not need to go down that route. I was about to pull the trigger on a 3750k machine (a favorite with gamers, I hear) but was advised, as I was doing a new build, to go with the latest technology as 4th gen chips at virtually the same price as 3rd gen processors were just round the corner and although there was only a little gain to be had in performance, there were some more meaningful benefits of using the new 1150 motherboards. Additionally the on-board GPUs (Intel HD 4600 and Iris particularly) were better.

Hope someone can chime in with ideas and this thread will develop as new board and chips become available in India through this month.

 

[rud3dawg]

Hi there, I would like to add a few points from my experience.

1. you do not need a xxxx'k' processor if you do not intend to overclock as I have seen rarely do any of us overclock I mean if I take a decent processor today i wouldn't feel it to be underpowered untill 2016 and after that the overclock can only be done to a small extent without professional cooling

2. For photo editing I believe any high end i5 should do (Depending upon your app) the job, because the main difference between an i3/i5/i7 is the cores/thread which help in better handling multi tasking (More apps in the Background or breaking the job in your app to several more instructions and designating more threads..) so if your App doesn't support using several threads etc.. then its not gonna be much different with an i7 (most of the new apps do ) also do take care of have better RAM (high FSB ) and try and use a decent sized SSD for your OS and to install the APP as well as use it for workspace. This I feel would show a lot of difference.

3. About the motherboards I personally prefer not to go with Intel because of my bad experiences long time ago but if you are in to Photo editing in your own cozy space then make sure you have more Sata ports and USB 3 ports

4. To help you more can you pls tell

• what are your PC uses and also ?
• How many USB devices do you see yourself connecting, ?
• How many Har drives do you see yourself adding ?
• How many monitors do you intend to connect?
• Do you intend to game ?
• Does your App use more algorithms pertaining to Open CL or something relevant that only one of the two NVdia/AMD graphic cards can do better ?

I generally check these things before building my PC .. might be different from others but i like knowing what and how well I am going to do with the Hardware bought . hyeah:hyeah:hyeah:

 

[jigarpatel]

Check below link for chip z87 motherboard.
Buy Online MSI H87M-G43 64GB DDR3 Intel Motherboard in india

 

[Staxxx]

Thank you so much for your post. I hope I am not duplicating some matters discussed in a previous post on the new build....but the short answer to your questions are:

What are your PC uses? Mainly to be used for Photoshop CS6 and some light web-browsing and downloads
How many USB devices do you see yourself connecting? Possibly 4 at the max
How many Hard drives do you see yourself adding ? Possibly 1 HDD now and 1 SSD and HDD at a later point.
How many monitors do you intend to connect? 1
Do you intend to game ? NO
Does your App use more algorithms pertaining to Open CL or something relevant that only one of the two NVdia/AMD graphic cards can do better ? I don't know exactly but I understand that many filters in Photoshop CS6 now farm out the work to the GPU. However this is the brunt of the main question - buy a slightly less expensive i5 CPU and spend some money on either a discreet graphics card or a SSD (any votes on the choice?) or go for the i7 cpu which will offer more core/threads and Hyper Threading both which should make some filter more responsive and run faster.

The Intel MoBo appears to be the most reasonably priced 1150 socket board that I have come across as yet, hence the choice. Thanks.

 

[mowgli80]

Photoshop CS6 GPU FAQ

Based on the link above, looks like some functionality in photoshop is optimized for opengl and opencl. I would go for an i5 and an nvidia(best graphics driver) discrete graphics card as compromise for single core performance and graphics card processing and get the best of both worlds. Also, would stay away from onboard gpu as they are not as proficient as discrete cards for opencl performance. I7 would give you a better single core performance but can't compete against highly vectorized gpu cores for parallel processing.