Haswell may not be a big deal as first thought

Lady Fitzgerald · 10 Aug 2013

linnemeyerhere said:

The interest in Haswell for me is the advancements its brought to the mobo but that alone isn't enough to make me upgrade from my Ivy rig but it's of interest.

The MOBO advancements had me drooling like a famous Russian pooch but the paucity of useable PCI-e lanes wouldn't have worked for me.

kbrady1979 · 10 Aug 2013

For gaming, Ivy Bridge actually outperforms Sandy Bridge-E, but that is because of how games are coded, not the architecture. Most people who get SB-E have a very specific reason to get it, not just because it's the most expensive line and they think more money = better.

I thought about the native SATA III ports too, but when you get right down to it, unless you are running a slew of SSD's, SATA II ports provide a mile enough bandwidth for hard drives. Most HDD can barely break 150MB/s Sequential Read/Write, much less SATA II speeds of 300MB/s. So the only gain is the amount of Intel SATA ports, which are helpful only to people using a bunch of SATA devices. I have 2xSATA III ports and 4xSATA II ports on the Intel chipset...with 4TB drives out and reasonably priced, that is a ton of storage!

It's tempting for sure....allllll those SATA ports, but I hate how hit or miss the CPU/Platform is.