General Gaming Article

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• Newegg Daily Deals: XFX Core Edition Radeon R9 295X2, AMD A10-7850K, and More!
• Computex 2015 Day 4: Acer Unveils a New Predator Desktop and 11K Monitor Setup [Video]
• Computex 2015 Day 4: Biostar Builds a Gaming Mobo for Skylake [Video]
• Computex 2015 Day 4: Examining Antec's Bold S10 Tower Case [Video]
• Computex 2015 Day 4: Cougar Crashes the Party with a Splash Resistant Keyboard (and Other Gear) [Video]
• Comcast offers $5 to customers for outage
• Build It: Maximizing Performance Per Square Inch
• Computex 2015 Day 4: Adata Details XPG Series RAM and SSDs [Video]
• Thermaltake Under Fire for Copying Case Designs
• Haswell-E: The 8-Core Game-Changer

Newegg Daily Deals: XFX Core Edition Radeon R9 295X2, AMD A10-7850K, and More! Posted: 05 Jun 2015 01:06 PM PDT Top Deal: Why go with one GPU when you can have two? And why air cool your GPUs when you can liquid cool them instead? While we're asking questions, why buy two graphics cards to get a pair of GPUs when you can buy one? If you can't satisfactorily answer those questions, then check out today's top deal for an XFX Core Edition Radeon R9 295X2 Graphics Card for $580 with free shipping (normally $630 - use coupon code: [EMCATAS72]). This dual-GPU card boasts a factory-fitted liquid cooling system and, for a limited time, comes with Dirt Rally. Other Deals: AMD Radeon R7 120GB 2.5-inch Solid State Drive (SSD) for $60 with free shipping (normally $70 - use coupon code: [EMCATAS27]) Mushkin Enhanced Stealth 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory for $90 with free shipping (normally $100 - use coupon code: [EMCATAS72]) MSI Z97 PC Mate LGA 1150 Intel Z97 ATX Intel Motherboard for $88 with $2 shipping (normally $110 - use coupon code: [EMCATAS28]; additional $10 Mail-in rebate) AMD A10-7850K Kaveri 3.7GHz FM2+ 95W Desktop Processor for $120 with free shipping (normally $130 - use coupon code: [EMCATAS69])

Computex 2015 Day 4: Acer Unveils a New Predator Desktop and 11K Monitor Setup [Video] Posted: 05 Jun 2015 12:55 PM PDT A little bit of everything Acer has its hands in multiple markets, and with that being the case, the company brought along a varied sample of products to Computex. One of them has yet to be finalized -- a new Predator gaming PC. While the final parts haven't been selected, Acer says users will be able to overclock the entire system with the push of a Turbo button on top of the chassis. For gamers on the go, Acer talked about a couple of gaming laptops, a 15.6-inch model and a 17.3-inch model. Both are being released under the company's Predator branding and will come with certain gaming amenities, like bordered WASD and arrow keys. However, the biggest feature is the inclusion of G-Sync on both laptops. One of the more interesting products was a Predator projector. As you might have guessed, it too is aimed at gamers. At just 1.8 meters away, the projector can beam a 100-inch image at Full HD 1080p. Whether or not there's a demand from gamers for a projector is something Acer will find out starting in September when this thing comes out. Though Acer is dabbling in projectors, it still plans on pursuing the monitor market. One of the displays it brought to Computex is what Acer claims the first 34-inch IPS UltraWide QHD curved panel with Nvidia G-Sync. Acer actually had three of them configured in a sweet Nvidia Surround setup. Folks, that translates to 11K...ELEVEN FREAKING K! Yeah, we had to wipe up some drool, too. The last thing we saw was a 4K monitor with G-Sync. This wasn't a curved monitor, so if you're not into that, rest assured there will be plenty of non-curved models available from various players. It's a TN panel, so it won't have the same quality as an IPS monitor, but should cost less.

Computex 2015 Day 4: Biostar Builds a Gaming Mobo for Skylake [Video] Posted: 05 Jun 2015 12:32 PM PDT Preparing for Skylake Even though Intel just recently added to its Broadwell line with the first LGA socket chips to sport Iris Pro 6200 graphics, the CPUs we're really waiting for are still right around the corner. We're talking about Skylake, which will require a new motherboard (due to a socket change) and new RAM (DDR4). Several DDR4 memory kits are already available, and now we're starting to see some Intel Z170 chipset boards appear for Skylake, such as the one Biostar showed us. It's another high end motherboard from Biostar, which seems to be working hard to shed its reputation as a low end player. The board has flexible storage connectivity options -- PCI-E M.2, SATA Express, and USB 3.1 Type C, to name a few. In keeping with the high end theme, there's a touch panel on the motherboard itself to turn the board on and off, as well as overclock. Other features include a 14-phase power design, all solid capacitors, three PCI-E x16 slots, three PCI-E x1 slots, HDMI and DVI output, and 8-channel audio. Biostar's Z170 board will be available in August for around $220.

Computex 2015 Day 4: Examining Antec's Bold S10 Tower Case [Video] Posted: 05 Jun 2015 12:12 PM PDT Big, bold, and expensive We've seen chambered cases before, but none like Antec's new Signature S10. The case sports three separate chambers, which you access by swinging open a two-piece side panel. It's a big case that can accommodate up to XL-ATX motherboards. It can also fit two 280mm or 420mm radiators and a host of storage drives. The bottom chamber is where the PSU sits, along with five 2.5-inch drive trays. Up above is a separate compartment dedicated to the motherboard and add-in cards. Finally, a front chamber is where you'll find more drive bays. In between it and the main chamber is a series of cooling fans and dust filters. The Signature 10 is supposed to be Antec's crown achievement. As such, it comes with an ambitious price tag -- $499 MRSP. That makes it one of the most expensive cases out there, though if you're looking to go big with your next build and have the money to spare, this could be a good option.

Computex 2015 Day 4: Cougar Crashes the Party with a Splash Resistant Keyboard (and Other Gear) [Video] Posted: 05 Jun 2015 11:50 AM PDT This Cougar won't scratch your couch Ever heard of Cougar? The German company has only been on the scene since 2007, which isn't exactly newcomer status at this point, but still lacks the decades of experience that some of its competitors boast. Nevertheless, Cougar continues to claw its way into the North American market with new product releases aimed at gamers, and we took a look at some of those at Computex. Cougar was eager to show off its QBX case for mini ITX builds. Though it's for smaller systems, it can fit a full size graphics card, up to four SSDs, and even a slim-loading optical drive up top. The company is also expanding its line of gaming mice. One in particular is the 550M, a mouse that was designed based on feedback from pro gaming teams. It uses Omron micro switches rated for up to 5 million clicks, has a 6400 DPI optical sensor, and a multicolor backlight system with two RGB zones. After looking at Cougar's mice, the company showed us a few different keyboards, including the 450K. It has a few unique features, including the use of hybrid mechanical switches. Each key is equipped with "mechanical mechanisms," all of which sit atop an underlying membrane. The thought process is to deliver a mechanical-like feel and sound while keeping the price tag much lower. It's also splash resistant. To demonstrate this, the company setup a fountain that continually poured five streams of water over the keyboard as it sat at an angle. See for yourself here:

Comcast offers $5 to customers for outage Posted: 05 Jun 2015 11:25 AM PDT Fill out form, get $5 Comcast is probably the most hated ISP out there, but for customers in the western U.S., the cable giant is making a gesture of penance. On Monday, a widespread outage affected internet customers when Comcast's DNS servers were overloaded and took a nose dive. Service was slowly restored to some areas starting Monday evening. "Since the incident, we have been working non-stop to fully understand the problem and bring additional DNS capacity online in the affected areas, so we can prevent it from happening again," Comcast said in a press release Tuesday. In an effort to compensate its Xfinity customers, Comcast is offering a $5 credit towards cable bills. If you were affected by the outage, you can apply for the credit using an online form on the Xfinity website. The offer is only offered to Xfinity customers in California, Washington state, and Tucson, Arizona. The credit will take 4-6 weeks to be applied as well, so don't expect it to hit this month's bill. If you don't want to rely on Comcast's DNS, you can always use Google's DNS servers. To use Google's DNS, open up your network settings on your PC or your DNS settings for your router and point them to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Build It: Maximizing Performance Per Square Inch Posted: 05 Jun 2015 11:00 AM PDT We cram two radiators, five fans, a dual-GPU video card, and 850-watt power supply into a micro-ATX cube—no big deal This rig should take two to four hours to build. Difficulty level is medium. The Mission Anyone can put some fancy gear into a regular tower case. It's like Lego, but not as expensive. With the growing trend toward shrinking cases, we like to challenge ourselves by maintaining silly amounts of performance within small real estate. We tried this route with a recent Build It, featuring a mini-ITX tower from Silverstone and a GTX 780 Ti video card from Nvidia, but there just wasn't enough physical space for the system to really shine. To achieve the power and cooling that we really wanted, we needed a bigger boat. This micro-ATX box is arguably our craziest attempt yet-not just in terms of how much mojo we've wedged in there, but also in how close this build came to not working at all. We discovered that there was pretty much no margin for error, and a slightly different selection of hardware probably would have meant failure to launch. Some of it we got lucky with, while other things we had to replace or scrounge for. But we clawed our way to victory, because the idea was too audacious to merely daydream about. Jumbo Shrimp We needed a solid foundation to house a card as beefy as a Radeon R9 295X2, which squeezes two 290X GPUs onto one dual-slot card and cools itself with an integrated 120mm closed-loop liquid cooler (CLC). We also decided on a 240mm CLC for our Intel Core i7-4770K. And the 295X2 alone would need a full-sized ATX power supply. But there aren't a lot of cases that can wrangle all this hardware and still provide enough ventilation to keep everyone happy. Luckily, we'd recently received a micro-ATX Bitfenix Colossus Mini, a shrink-ray version of the company's full-tower case. Not to be confused with the mini-ITX Mini, which is even mini-er. Our Mini had enough fan mounts and just enough internal real estate to close the deal. Barely. After some experimentation (explained later), we settled on the Lepa G850-MAS power supply, an 850-watt unit. This PSU fit the bill because its cables are clustered to one side of the unit, and it's been well-reviewed. Being a "gold" rated PSU didn't hurt, either. We needed a lot of power efficiency to make this build work. Our CPU got a Cooler Master Glacer 240L, a CLC with a 240mm radiator, to keep it nice and chilly. The connectors on the radiator end can swivel for a level of flexibility that you don't usually see with this type of unit. Our motherboard of choice was a micro-ATX Gigabyte Z97M-D3H, which gave us some ergonomic flexibility later on. 1. I'm Your Biggest Fan The Bitfenix Colossus Mini comes with two 120mm stock fans. We removed them both and replaced them with a pair of Enermax TKTKs that we wanted to test out. This upgrades us from 3-pin to 4-pin fans, allowing us to control their speed ranges with instructions given to the motherboard. We salvaged a 4-pin splitter cable from a CLC kit to plug both fans into one mobo fan header. These fans install in the bottom as intakes, with their screws coming in from below. We added chrome grills to keep the blades from getting caught on anything. Safety first! You could also install a single 230mm fan in this spot instead. 2. Install the Cooler We knew we needed a boatload of power to handle this kind of gear, so we aimed for at least 850 watts. At the same time, the power supply couldn't be too beefy, because a 295X stretches across the entire length of this case and could obstruct the unit. Even with our connectors clustered to the left, we barely got the card to slide past the cables. It still blocks two connectors, but the two PCIe cables and the SATA power cable that we can attach are plenty for our purposes. The SATA cable will power an SSD and the CLC's pump. There's a second 8-pin CPU power cable coming out the back that we won't be using, but there's space to tuck it away on the other side of the PSU. Unfortunately, there isn't anywhere else to tuck other cables out of sight, but the Colossus Mini doesn't have a side window to expose our messy internals. 3. Seeing Double Putting in the video card isn't as hard as it looks. It just needs to go in before the CPU's radiator does. The others cables pictured can be pulled out of the way. The tightest fit in this section was actually the card's own radiator, which gets close enough to the 295X2 to graze its backplate. Turned 180 degrees, the rad would not fit. If the card was fatter than normal, the tubing on the radiator above it might not be bendy enough to get around. If the card were too tall, it would block our critical power supply connectors. Basically, AMD's reference dimensions were critical to our success. 4. X Marks the Spot The X-shaped bracket pictured is the backplate for our Cooler Master's Glacer 240L CPU cooler. This installation process became, shall we say, an enlightening challenge when confined to a Colossus Mini that was starting to fill up with hardware. In retrospect, installing the cooler first probably would have been better. The bracket doesn't stick through the other side of the motherboard, so it's difficult to fasten the heatsink's bracket to it. The backplate's adhesive pads are also very small and not very effective. Still, we were able to squeeze a 4.4GHz overclock out of our Core i7-4770K CPU, despite it competing with the video card for intake. The Gigabyte Z97M-D3H micro-ATX board is not a fancy unit, so we didn't expect record-breaking OCs anyway. The cooler's 240mm radiator also ended up blocking the other PCI Express slot on the motherboard when we installed it in the top of the case, so it turns out that a dual-GPU card was the best option after all. 5. Do You Even Flip? The Cooler Master 240L comes with its fans preinstalled on the radiator, which has become increasingly popular. CM also attached the fans with small screws that can only be reached by a screwdriver with a narrow shaft. We had a Snap-On kit that fit the bill. We needed to flip the fans so that they would be pulling heat off the radiator and blowing it out of the case, instead of fighting the video card for intake. How is this possible? Well, the Colossus Mini has an inverted motherboard tray, so the mobo goes in upside down-putting the video card right below the 240L. This also put a bunch of USB, front-panel, and audio connectors at the top of the case, so we had to hook up those before they were blocked by the 240L's rad. This meant reversing the Colossus Mini's side panels, which is why the white stripes on the side don't line up with the white stripe on the front; the case's power button is located on a side panel instead, making wiring a bit challenging with our jam-packed system. 6. Radical Engineering Installing the video card's radiator was pretty easy by comparison. We had already installed the CPU's heatsink with its tubing on the opposite side of the video card radiator's mount point. That way, the heatsink could be removed later, without having to take out the rad first. The cable for its pre-attached 120mm fan is wired directly into the card and gets power right off of the PCI Express bus, which is a smart way of eliminating the need for an extra fan header on the motherboard. Likely buyers of this board will probably be using a lot of fan headers already, and this design keeps the cabling clean for showing off to your friends and neighbors. Our non-retail version of the card didn't come with mounting screws (the retail one does), but power-supply screws worked perfectly and are commonly found on most builders' workbenches. The part of the rad where the tubes goes in has some bulk, so it has to be on the bottom. There's literally no room to rotate it, because the video card is right there. 1. The 5.25-inch drive bay is secured with six screws, so we just pulled it out to make way for this 12.5-inch long video card. 2. The connectors on this radiator can rotate a full 360 degrees, so maneuvering them around the video card wasn't a problem. 3. The front of the case has a large grill that the power supply uses as an intake, helping it run coolly and efficiently. 4. The rear of the case will fit a 140mm fan, but case fans installed right below would probably block a 140mm radiator. The Little Engine That Could Were it not for our library of spare parts, this build might not have come together. The flip side is that we sometimes use a part or two that's hard to find at retail, like our Lepa G850-MAS, so the build ends up an experiment instead of something you could replicate. If you have a PSU that's semi-modular or non-modular, no longer than 6.3 inches, and provides about 850 watts or more, and its modular connectors are clustered close to the motherboard power cable, you may be in luck. As for our storage devices, there's a metal plate for that, which screws in above the motherboard, and leaving it in during photography would have blocked the view of everything inside. Since it's just a plate with drive mounts on it, we simply left it out of the shots. But we can tell you that it could fit two 2.5-inch drives and one 3.5-inch drive. Your connectors can't go in at right angles, though, because the rear of the drive doesn't end up flush against the edge of the plate. Hopefully, Bitfenix will consider changing that in later versions of this case. But you're probably wondering what the build felt like once it was finally up and running. Well, with two 290X GPUs along for the ride, we could max out all our game settings even at Ultra HD (aka 4K) res. We did usually disable anti-aliasing, because the much higher pixel density at 3840x2160 gains minimal visual improvements from AA but has a high performance cost. AMD's drivers also let us attempt to force Crossfire (the company's version of SLI) when a game didn't have a CF profile written for it, so that was nice. The motherboard handled a CPU overclock of 4.4GHz without breaking a sweat, keeping us surprisingly close to the zero-point machine's hex-core Core i7-3930K. The fans on the 240mm radiator did get louder than we'd like. Even with the motherboard instructed to use a "silent" mode, the fans still cranked up to about 1,800rpm under load. The video card's radiator fan hardly made a peep, despite the card never hitting 70 degrees Celsius, so we know that the system was getting plenty of air. It could be that the 240L was fighting the 295's intake fan for air, despite the 240L's fans being on the other side of the rad. But overall, the build felt like a success, and we enjoyed learning more about space management.

Computex 2015 Day 4: Adata Details XPG Series RAM and SSDs [Video] Posted: 05 Jun 2015 10:31 AM PDT Record breaking RAM Adata is a company that kind of flies under the radar -- it doesn't have the same brand recognition as the Corsairs and Crucials of the world, and it doesn't chase world records in RAM frequency as fervently as G.Skill. But it does offer some interesting products, not just in the value segment, but also aimed at gamers. Some of those were on display at Computex, including new DDR4 RAM under its gaming oriented XPG line. XPG is a subdivision of Adata and is recognizable by its aggressive looking heatspreaders. According to Adata, one of the new kits it had on display was able to reach over 4,000MHz and set a memory frequency record, albeit using LN2 cooling. Adata is also coming out with a new SSD line under its XPG brand. Dubbed SX930, the new line uses a SATA 6Gbps interface and will range in capacity from 120GB to 480GB. The drives sport JMicron controllers and are rated to transfer data at up to 560MB/s. Have a look:

Thermaltake Under Fire for Copying Case Designs Posted: 05 Jun 2015 09:57 AM PDT Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...and cause for ire Thermaltake managed to ruffle a few feathers with the release of new cases at Computex. One of them is the Suppressor F51, a case that looks almost identical Fractal Design's R5, though it's the company's new premium line of W Series cases that have caused a shit storm. After catching wind of Thermaltake's new cases, Kevin Keating, vice president of CaseLabs, outright accused the company of copying its competitors' designs in a seething Facebook post. Keating took it a step further and said Thermaltake has a history of ripping off its competitors, and that's where things get really interesting. Keating recounts how in July 2013, CaseLabs exhibited two of its Merlin SM8 cases at PDXLAN 22. At the time, CaseLabs didn't have a booth, but the response to its cases was so overwhelmingly positive, the company was asked to return a year later for PDXLAN 23 as an official sponsor. CaseLabs pounced on the opportunity and got a booth, bringing along with it a bunch of cases, including its Mercury case line (S3, S5, and S8). "It was at this time we found out Thermaltake was a major sponsor of this event (and have been) and their case designer, Shannon, was in attendance (as he usually is). Shannon was introduced to my dad (CL owner) and I via a mutual friend," Keating explains. "Shannon then proceeded to tell us how much he liked our cases, and he was a big fan. He seemed very genuine, and overall a nice person. He started asking us about our cases and said, 'Wow I wish our company made cases like this, can I take some pictures to send to our R&D department'? A bit flabbergasted I told him no which he then replied, 'Well I guess we will just buy one then'." Keating has invoices showing that Thermaltake had purchased its Merlin SM8 case back in September of 2013, two months after it was showed off for the first time. At this point, it should be noted that it's not unusual for product designers to purchase wares from their competitors. But where things go wrong, at least according to Keating, is when Thermaltake starts blatantly copying its designs. "For those who know me, you know I am not a person to create drama. Nor am I a person to be dishonest, or try to slander someone out of spite. With that being said I can no longer hold my tongue about Shannon Robb 'Case Designer' at Thermaltake," Keating says. "For those of you at Computex you may know what I'm talking about… Thermaltake has just announced their 'new' case line last night, the 'new TT premium line W series extreme chassis'. It is more than evident this is a stolen concept. Not only did Shannon clone our Mercury line, with his Core line, but now they have stolen our MAGNUM and Merlin designs as well." Keating posted the above photo to his Facebook rant to demonstrate the similarities between CaseLabs' Merlin SM8 and Thermaltake's TH10. The supposed scandal has prompted several technology sites to post comparison photos of Thermaltake's products to ones they appear to have copied. One of those is Overclock3D, which also posted a lengthy video detailing the situation. It's worth a visit, and the comparison pics, like the one below, are definitely worth examining. The case on the left is Fractal Design's Define R5 and the case on the right is Thermaltake's newly unveiled Suppressor F51. To be fair, both look a little similar to Antec's Performance One series, and as some have noted, emulation is pretty common in the case industry. However, some feel that Thermaltake crosses the line with several products that look almost identical to its competitors, including everything from fans and cases, to fan controllers and waterblocks. Here's another example: On the left is an image on FrozenCPU's website of Apogee's XL CPU water, and the right is Thermaltake's photo of its W2 CPU waterblock. So, what does Thermaltake have to say about this? We can't find the post, but according to Legit Reviews, Shannon Rob issued the following statement on Facebook: Hi Guys, sorry I didnt respond to this sooner but in TW it is just now like 7AM… First off anyone who has seen these cases, they are in no way as far as fitment and functionalitya copy of anything. The scalability and modularity are simply awesome. as far as exterior appearance, we chose a design that ideally fit everything we wanted to accomplish with the design and similar with the panel grille designs. Its only partially about appearance and more about what will provide best airflow without sacrificing panel integrity and rigidity. Lastly, do remember that as a chassis manufacturer we all make cases and if you remember we all used to have beige boxes, its not about copying anything its about what makes the best fit for the design you are trying to accomplish. We are pushing the limits on many things as far as performance and feature sets and im glad you think our chassis is so awesome, because if you really like it that much you will like the price even better! stay tuned to see more cool stuff from computex. So what do you think -- is Thermaltake blatantly ripping off designs from its competitors, or is this much ado about nothing?

Haswell-E: The 8-Core Game-Changer Posted: 05 Jun 2015 08:44 AM PDT A deep dive into Intel's Haswell-E After three long years of going hungry with six cores, red meat is finally back on the menu for enthusiasts. And not just any gamey slab full of gristle with shared cores, either. With its new eight-core Haswell-E CPU, Intel may have served up the most mouth-watering, beautifully seared piece of red meat in a long time. And it's a good thing, too, because enthusiast's stomachs have been growling. Devil's Canyon? That puny quad-core was just an appetizer. And that dual-core highly overclockable Pentium K CPU? It's the mint you grab on your way out of the steak house. No, what enthusiasts have craved and wanted—ever since Intel's original clock-blocking job on the original Sandy Bridge-E—is a true, overclockable enthusiast chip with eight cores. So if you're ready for a belt loosening belly full of enthusiast-level prime rib, pass the horseradish, get that damned salad off our table, and read on to see if Intel's Haswell-E is everything we hoped it would be. The wait is Over: Haswell-E The first consumer Intel eight-core arrives at last Being a member of the PC enthusiast class is not an easy path to follow. Sure, you get the most cores and priciest parts, but it also means you wait a hell of a long time between CPU upgrades. And with Intel's cadence the last few years, it also means you get the leftovers. It's been that way since Intel went with its two-socket strategy with the original LGA1366/LGA1156. Those who picked the big-boy socket always got the shaft. The original Ivy Bridge in LGA1156 socket, for example, hit the streets in April of 2012. Intel then rewarded the small-socket crowd with its Haswell in June of 2013. It wasn't until September of 2013 that big-boy socket users got Ivy Bridge-E for their LGA2011s. But with Haswell already tearing up the benchmarks, who the hell cared? Well, that time has come with Haswell-E, Intel's first replacement for the aging LGA2011 platform since 2011. For the first time since the original Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, paying the premium price actually nets you more: namely, the company's first consumer eight-core CPU. Meet the T-Rex of consumer CPUs: The Core i7-5960X Overclocking to 4.5GHz and Beyond We were a little leery of Haswell when it first launched last year. It was, after all, a chip seemingly tuned for the mobile/laptoppy world we were told was our post-PC apocalyptic future. Despite this, we recognized the chip as the CPU to have for new system builders. Clock for clock, its 22nm process tri-gate transistors put everything else to shame—even the six-core Core i7-3930K chip in many tasks. So it's no surprise that when Intel took a quad-core Haswell, put it in the Xerox machine, and hit the copy button, we'd be ecstatic. Eight cores are decidedly better than six or four cores when you need them. The cores don't come without a cost though, and we don't mean the usual painful price Intel asks for its highest-end CPUs. It's no secret that more cores means more heat, which means lower clock speeds. That's one of the rationales Intel used with the original six-core Core i7-3960X. Although sold as a six-core, the original Sandy Bridge-E was built using an eight-core die on which Intel had switched off two cores. Intel said it wanted to balance the needs of the many versus the needs of the few—that is, by turning off two of the cores, the part could hit higher clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i7-3960X had a base clock of 3.3GHz and Turbo Boost of 3.9GHz, and most could overclock it to 5GHz. The same chip packaged as a Xeon with all eight cores working—the Xeon E5-2687W—was locked down at 3.1GHz and mostly buzzed along at 3.4GHz. Fully Unlocked With the new Core i7-5960X—the only eight-core of the bunch—the chip starts at a seemingly pedestrian 3GHz with a Turbo Boost of one core up to 3.5GHz. Those subsonic clock speeds won't impress against the Core i7-4790K, which starts at 4GHz. You'll fi nd more on how well Haswell-E performs against Haswell in our performance section, but that's the price to be paid, apparently, to get a chip with this many cores under the heat spreader. Regarding thermals, Intel has increased the TDP rating to 140 watts versus the 130 watts of Ivy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge-E. If the low clocks annoy you, the good news is the part is fully unlocked, so overclocking has been approved. For our test units, we had tight deadlines, so didn't get far with our overclocking efforts. But talking with vendors, most seem pleased with the clock speeds they're seeing. One vendor told us overclocks of all cores at 4.5GHz are already obtainable, with newer microcode updates expected to improve that. With even the Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K topping out at 4.7GHz to 4.8GHz, a 4.5GHz is actually a healthy overclock for an eight-core CPU. When you dive down into the actual cores though, much is the same, of course. It's based on a 22nm process. It has "3D" trigate transistors and integrated voltage regulation. Oh, and it's also the first CPU to feature an integrated DDR4 memory controller. DDR4 Details The memory stalemate is over If you think Haswell-E has been a long wait, just think about DDR3, which made its debut as main memory in 2007 systems. Yes, 2007. The only component that's lasted seven years in most enthusiasts' systems might be the PSU, but it's even rare to find anyone kicking a 500-watt PSU from 2007 these days. DDR4 has been in gestation seemingly as long, so why the delay? From what we can tell, resistance to yet another new memory standard when people thought the PC was dying has been the root delay. And it didn't help that no one wanted to stick their head out first. RAM makers didn't want to begin producing DDR4 in volume until AMD or Intel made chipsets for it, while AMD and Intel didn't want to support it because of the costs it would add to PCs. The stalemate finally ends with Haswell-E, which integrates a quadchannel DDR4 memory controller into its die. Initial launch speeds of DDR4 clock in at DDR4/2133. For those already running DDR3 at 3GHz or higher, a 2,133 data rate is a snooze, but you should realize that anything over 2,133 is overclocked RAM. With DDR4, the JEDEC speeds (the body that sets RAM standards) already has target data rates of 3,200 on the map. RAM vendors we've talked to are already shopping DIMMS near that speed. But the best part of DDR4 may be its density message. For years, consumer DDR3 has topped out at 8GB on a DIMM. With DDR4, we should see 16B DIMMs almost immediately, and stacking of chips is built into the standard, so it's possible we'll see 32GB DIMMs over its lifetime. On a quad-channel, eight-DIMM motherboard, you should expect to be able to build systems with 128GB of RAM using non-ECC DIMMs almost immediately. DDR4 also brings power savings and other improvements, but the main highlights enthusiasts should expect are higher densities and higher clocks. Oh, and higher prices. RAM prices haven't been fun for anyone of late, but DDR4 will definitely be a premium part for some time. In fact, we couldn't even get exact pricing from memory vendors as we were going to press, so we're bracing for some really bad news. PCIe Lanes Now a feature to be blocked Over the years, we've come to expect Intel to clock-block core counts, clock speeds, Hyper-Threading, and even cache for "market segmentation" purposes. What that means is Intel has to find ways to differentiate one CPU from another. Sometimes that's by turning off Hyper-Threading (witness Core i5 and Core i7) and sometimes its by locking down clock speeds. With Haswell-E though, Intel has gone to new heights with its clock-blocking by actually turning off PCIe lanes on some Haswell-E parts. At the top end, you have the 3GHz Core i7-5960X with eight cores. In the midrange you have the six-core 3.5GHz Core i7-5930K. And at the "low-end" you have the six-core 3.3GHz Core i7-5820K. The 5930K and the 5820K are virtually the same in specs except for one key difference: The PCIe lanes get blocked. Yes, while the Core i7-5960X and Core i7-5930K get 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0, the Core i7-5820K gets an odd 28 lanes of PCIe 3.0. That means those who hoped to build "budget" Haswell-E boxes with multiple GPUs may have to think hard about using the lowest-end Haswell-E chip. The good news is that for most people, it won't matter. Plenty of people run Haswell systems with SLI or CrossFire, and those CPUs are limited to 16 lanes. Boards with PLX switches even support four-way GPU setups. Still, it's a brain bender to think that when you populate an X99 board with the lowest-end Haswell-E, the PCIe configuration will change. At least they'll work, just more slowly. Intel says it worked with board vendors to make sure all the slots will function with the budget part. X99 Finally, the chipset high-end enthusiasts want, sort of You know what we won't miss? The X79 chipset. No offense to X79 owners, while the Core i7-4960X can stick around for a bit, X79 can take its under-spec'ed butt out of our establishment. Think we're being too harsh? We don't. X79 has no native USB 3.0 support. And its SATA 6Gb/s ports? Only two. It almost reads like a feature set from the last decade. Fortunately, Intel has gone hog wild in overcompensating for the weaknesses of X79. X99 has eight USB 2.0 ports and six USB 3.0 ports. For SATA 6Gb/s, Intel adds 10 ports to X99. Yes, 10. That gazongo number, however, is balanced out by two glaring omissions: no official SATA Express or M.2 support that came with Z97. Intel would only say motherboard vendors were free to implement it. We guess Intel left the feature off as the firm is a stickler for testing new interfaces before adding official support. At this point, SATA Express has been a noshow. After all, motherboards with SATA Express became available in May with Z97, yet we still haven't seen any native SATA Express drives. We expect most vendors to simply add it through discrete controllers. Intel overcompensated in SATA on X99 but oddly left SATA Express on the cutting-room floor. One potential weakness of X99 is Intel's use of the DMI 2.0. That offers roughly 2.5GB/s of transfer speed between the CPU and the south bridge or PCH, but with the board hanging 10 SATA devices, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and 8 PCIe Gen 2.0 lanes off that link, there's potential for massive congestion in a worst-case scenario. But, says Intel, you can just hang devices off the plentiful PCIe Gen 3.0 from the CPU. That does bring up our last point: the PCIe lanes. There will be confusion over the PCIe lane configuration on systems with Core i7-5820K parts. With only 28 lanes available, there's concern whole slots will be turned off. That won't happen, Intel says. Instead, if you go with the low-rent ride, you simply lose bandwidth, but will still have more than you can get from a normal LGA1150-based Core i7-4770K. It will be confusing, but we expect motherboard vendors to sort it out. Haswell-E does bring one more interesting PCIe configuration—the ability to run five graphics cards in the PCIe slots at x8 speeds. What for? Intel didn't explain. Maybe mining configurations where miners are already running six GPUs. But mining doesn't seem to need the bandwidth that a x8 slot would provide. The other possibility is a five-way graphics card configuration being planned by Nvidia or AMD. At this point it's just conjecture, but one thing we know is that X99 is a welcome upgrade. Good riddance X79. Core Competency How many cores do you really need? Like great technology philosopher Sir Mix-A-Lot says, we like big cores and we cannot lie. We want as many cores as legally available. But we recognize that not everyone rolls as hard as we do with a posse of threads. With Intel's first eight-core CPU, consumers can now pick from two cores all the way to eight on the Intel side of the aisle—and then there's Hyper-Threading to confuse you even more. So, how many cores do you need? We'll give you the quick-and-dirty lowdown. Two Cores Normally, we'd completely skip dual-cores without Hyper-Threading because the parts tend to be the very bottom end of the pool Celerons. Our asterisk is the new Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition, or "Pentium K," which is a real hoot of a chip. It easily overclocks and is dead cheap. It's not the fastest in content creation by a long shot, but if we were building an ultra-budget gaming rig and needed to steal from the CPU budget for a faster GPU, we'd recommend this one. Otherwise, we see dual-cores as purely ultra-budget parts today. Two Cores with Hyper-Threading For your parents who need a reliable, solid PC without overclocking (you really don't want to explain how to back down the core voltage in the BIOS to grandma, do you?), the dual-core Core i3 parts fulfill the needs of most people who only do content creation on occasion. Hyper-Threading adds value in multi-threaded and multi-tasking jobs. You can almost think of these chips with Hyper-Threading as three-core CPUs. Four Cores For anyone who does content creation such as video editing, encoding, or even photo editing with newer applications, a quad-core is usually our recommended part. Newer game consoles are also expected to push minimum specs for newer games to quadcores or more as well, so for most people who carry an Enthusiast badge, a quad-core part is the place to start. It's indeed a glorious thing to see a task manager with this many threads, but not everyone needs them. Four Cores with Hyper-Threading Hyper-Threading got a bad name early on from the Pentium 4 and existing software that actually saw it reduce performance when turned on. Those days are long behind us though, and Hyper-Threading offers a nice performance boost with its virtual cores. How much? A 3.5GHz Core i7 quad-core with Hyper-Threading generally offers the same performance on multi-threaded tasks as a Core i5 running at 4.5GHz. The Hyper-Threading helps with content creation and, we'd say, if content creation is 30 percent or less of your time, this is the place to be. It's the best fit for 90 percent of enthusiasts. Six Cores with Hyper-Threading Once you pass the quad-core mark, you are moving pixels professionally in video editing, 3D modeling, or other tasks that necessitate the costs of a six-core chip or more. We still think that for 90 percent of folks, a four-core CPU is plenty, but if losing time rendering a video costs you money (or you're ADD), pay for a six-core or more CPU. How to decide if you need six or eight cores? Read on. Eight Cores with Hyper-Threading Not everyone needs an eight-core processor. In fact, one way to save cash is to buy the midrange six-core chip. But, if time is money, an eight-core chip will pay for itself. For example, the eight-core Haswell-E is about 45 percent faster than the four-core Core i7-4790K chip. If your render job is three hours, that's more time working on other paying projects. The gap gets smaller between the six-core and the eight-core, so it becomes about how much your time is worth. To give you an idea, the 3.3GHz Core i7-5960X is about 20 percent faster than the Core i7-4960X running at 4GHz. Intel's Top Guns Compared The LGA2011-based Core i7-4960X (left) and the LGA2011-v3-based Core i7-5960X (middle) dwarf the Core i7-4790K chip (right). Note the change in the heat spreader between the older 4960X and 5960X, which now has larger "wings" to make it easier to remove the CPU. The breather hole, which allows for curing of the thermal interface material, has also been moved. Finally, while the chips are the same size, they're keyed differently to stop you installing a newer Haswell-E into an older Ivy Bridge-E board. Benchmarks Performance junkies, rejoice! Haswell-E hits it out of the ballpark For our testing, we set up three identical systems with the fastest available CPUs for each platform. Each system used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 with the same 340.52 drivers, Corsair 240GB Neutron GTX SSDs, and 64-bit Windows 8.1 Enterprise. Since we've had issues with clock speeds varying on cards that physically look the same, we also verified the clock speeds of each GPU manually and also recorded the multiplier, b-clock, and speeds the parts run at under single-threaded and multi-threaded loads. So you know, the 3GHz Core i7-5960X's would run at 3.5GHz on single-threaded tasks but usually sat at 3.33GHz on multithreaded tasks. The 3.6GHz Core i7-4960X ran everything at 4GHz, including multithreading tasks. The 4GHz Core i7-4790K part sat at 4.4GHz on both single- and multithreaded loads. For Z97, we used a Gigabyte Z97M-D3H mobo with a Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" chip aboard. An Asus Sabertooth X79 did the duty for our Core i7-4960X "Ivy Bridge-E" chip. Finally, for our Core i7-5960X chip, we obtained an early Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5 motherboard. The board was pretty early but we feel comfortable with our performance numbers as Intel has claimed the Core i7-5960X was "45 percent" faster than a quadcore chip, and that's what we saw in some of our tests. One thing to note: The RAM capacities were different but in the grand scheme of things and the tests we ran, it has no impact. The Sabertooth X79 had 16GB of DDR3/2133 in quad-channel mode, the Z97M-D3H had 16GB of DDR3/2133 in dual-channel mode. Finally, the X99-Gaming 5 board had 32GB of Corsair DDR4/2133. All three CPUs will overclock, but we tested at stock speeds to get a good baseline feel. For our benchmarks, we selected from a pile of real-world games, synthetic tests, as well as real-world applications across a wide gamut of disciplines. Our gaming tests were also run at very low resolutions and low-quality settings to take the graphics card out of the equation. We also acknowledge that people want to know what they can expect from the different CPUs at realistic settings and resolutions, so we also ran all of the games at their highest settings at 1920x1080 resolution, which is still the norm in PC gaming. We used a Gigabyte X99 motherboard (without the final heatsinks for the voltageregulation modules) for our testing. The Results We could get into a multi-sentence analysis of how it did and slowly break out with our verdict but in a society where people get impatient at the microwave, we'll give you the goods up front: Holy Frakking Smokes, this chip is fast! The Core i7-5960X is simply everything high-end enthusiasts have been dreaming about. Just to give you an idea, we've been recording scores from $7,000 and $13,000 PCs in our custom Premiere Pro CS6 benchmark for a couple of years now. The fastest we've ever seen is the Digital Storm Aventum II that we reviewed in our January 2014 issue. The 3.3GHz Core i7-5960X was faster than the Aventum II's Core i7-4960X running at 4.7GHz. Again, at stock speeds, the Haswell-E was faster than the fastest Ivy Bridge-E machine we've ever seen. It wasn't just Premiere Pro CS6 we saw that spread in either. In most of our tests that stress multi-threading, we saw roughly a 45 to 50 percent improvement going from the Haswell to the Haswell-E part. The scaling gets tighter when you're comparing the six-core Core i7-4960X, but it's still a nice, big number. We generally saw a 20 to 25 percent improvement in multithreaded tasks. That's not even factoring in the clock differences between the parts. The Core i7-4790K buzzes along at 4.4GHz—1.1GHz faster than the Core i7-5960X in multithreaded tasks—yet it still got stomped by 45 to 50 percent. The Core i7-4960X had a nearly 700MHz clock advantage as well over the eight-core chip. The whole world isn't multi-threaded, though. Once we get to workloads that don't push all eight cores, the higher clock speeds of the other parts predictably take over. ProShow Producer 5.0, for example, has never pushed more than four threads and we saw the Core i7-5960X lose by 17 percent. The same happened in our custom Stitch.EFx 2.0 benchmark, too. In fact, in general, the Core i7-4790K will be faster thanks to its clock speed advantage. If you overclocked the Core i7-5960X to 4GHz or 4.4GHz on just four cores, the two should be on par in pure performance on light-duty workloads. In gaming, we saw some results from our tests that are a little bewildering. At low-resolution and low-quality settings, where the graphics card was not the bottleneck, the Core i7-4790K had the same 10 to 20 percent advantage. When we ran the same tests at ultra and 1080p resolution, the Core i7-5960X actually had a slight advantage in some of the runs against the Core i7-4790K chip. We think that may be from the bandwidth advantage the 5960X has. Remember, we ran all of the RAM at 2,133, so it's not DDR4 versus DDR3. It's really quad-channel versus dual-channel. We actually put a full breakdown of each of the benchmarks and detailed analysis on www.maximumpc.com if you really want to nerd out on the performance. What You Should Buy Let's say it again: The Core i7-5960X stands as the single fastest CPU we've seen to date. It's simply a monster for performance in multi-threaded tasks and we think that once you've overclocked it, it'll be as fast as all the others in tasks that aren't threadheavy workloads. But Is It for You? That performance, however, doesn't mean everyone should start saving to buy a $1,000 CPU. No, for most people, the dynamic doesn't change. For the 80 percent of you who fall into the average Joe or Jane nerd category, a four-core with Hyper-Threading still offers the best bang for the buck. It won't be as fast as the eight-core, but unless you're really working your rig for a living, made of money, or hate for your Handbrake encodes to take that extra 25 minutes, you can slum it with the Core i7-4790K chip. You don't even have to heavily overclock it for the performance to be extremely peppy. For the remaining 20 percent who actually do a lot of encoding, rendering, professional photo editing, or heavy multi-tasking, the Core i7-5960X stands as the must-have CPU. It's the chip you've been waiting for Intel to release. Just know that at purely stock speeds, you do give up performance to the Core i7-4790K part. But again, the good news is that with minor overclocking tweaks, it'll be the equal or better of the quad-core chip. What's really nice here is that for the first time, Intel is giving its "Extreme" SKU something truly extra for the $999 they spend. Previous Core i7 Extreme parts have always been good overclockers, but a lot of people bypassed them for the midrange chips such as the Core i7-4930K, which gave you the same core counts and overclocking to boot. The only true differentiation Extreme CPU buyers got was bragging rights. With Haswell-E, the Extreme buyers are the only ones with eight-core parts. The Upgrade Dilemma Bang-for-the-buck buyers also get a treat from the six-core Core i7-5820K chip. At $389, it's slightly more expensive than the chip it replaces—the $323 Core i7-4820K—but the extra price nets you two more cores. Yes, you lose PCIe bandwidth but most people probably won't notice the difference. We didn't have a Core i7-5820K part to test, but we believe on our testing with the Core i7-5960X that minor overclocking on the cheap Haswell-E would easily make it the equal of Intel's previous six-core chips that could never be had for less than $580. And that, of course, brings us to the last point of discussion: Should you upgrade from your Core i7-4960X part? The easy answer to that is no. In pure CPU-on-CPU showdowns, the Core i7-4960X is about 20 percent slower in multi-threaded tasks, and in light-duty threads it's about the same, thanks to the clock-speed advantage the Core i7-4960X has. There are two reasons we might want to toss aside the older chip, though. The first is the pathetic SATA 6Gb/s ports, which, frankly, you actually need on a heavy-duty work machine. The second reason would be the folks for whom a 20 percent reduction in rendering time would actually be worth paying for.

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