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I'm upgrading my system. I've already got the ASRock Z87 Extreme 4 motherboard, and 8 GB of G Skill 1866 cas 9 ram. I'm planning on getting an i7 to make this complete, but I'm torn between the 4770k and the 4771.

They have the same stock clocks, so the trade off is the K lets you overclock and the 4771 has all the instruction sets.

I'm not that excited about overclocking on the haswell platform. I have a coolermaster hyper 212+ with dual fans, and decent case airflow, but all I've been reading is that the chips run hot and can't really go above 4.2 or 4.3 without heavy overvolting and massive cooling. I've also read about people achieving a stable OC, only to have it become unstable a few months later. Basically, the chip doesn't OC well.

On the other hand, I don't think I'll ever need the virtualization instructions, so the only thing I'm curious about is TSX. This is supposed to increase multi-threaded performance, if I understand correctly. What is the chance of TSX showing up in mainstream applications and games in the next 3 years or so?

Right now, the prices I've seen on PC Parts picker put the 4771 at 299.99 and the 4770k at 319.99. At those prices, and given the poor overclocking ability of this chip, I'm inclined to get the 4771.

Bonus question: It is possible to enable 'multicore enhancement' which lets all 4 cores turbo to 3.9, correct?

TSX is imho a stillborn. It might be used for some specialized software for some supercomputer somewhere but why would anyone write software for a new instructionset that even Intel isn't pushing all over the range? Especially as it requires a whole new mindset about multithreading.
VT-D isn't that easy to get going, requires motherboard support and only seem to work for some rare combinations of cpu and motherboard. You can still do virtualization without it, it's just for mapping hardware directly into the VM.

I'd buy a 4770K i think

Heh, I posed one of these questions in other forums but the issue is nobody can give you concrete data, at least that I've seen. It will depend on the type of hardware visualization you are running and the VM machine configuration. Given how poorly Haswell chips can overclock, buying an unlocked one may not even matter though. I wish I had bought a vanilla 4770 for that reason myself as the chip no longer is stable beyond 4Ghz. I'd love to test what sort of difference VT-d would make with my VM workloads as they do max out the processor.

Regarding TSX, that's an enterprise / server-centric feature. Games will certainly not support it and most desktop programs probably won't anytime soon. It's nice to have, but I wouldn't count on using it.

If I was building a new PC I would go with a Ivy Bridge 3770k. Sure they run on the hot side overclocked, But I have not read about chip degradation on IVY like I have read on many occasions like Haswell. I think it has something to do with the tiny voltage regulators inside the haswell chips. Since that is the biggest difference between the two chips.

When it comes to gaming the difference between a 2600k, 3770k and 4770k is below 5 % difference between all of them.

Kougar wrote:

Regarding TSX, that's an enterprise / server-centric feature. Games will certainly not support it and most desktop programs probably won't anytime soon. It's nice to have, but I wouldn't count on using it.

glibc supports TSX lock elision since version 2.18 and it's enabled at least in the distro I use (Arch Linux). So multi-threaded programs on Linux already support it to some extent. But, yes, I doubt it makes any difference in typical desktop workloads.

I ended up going with the 4770K after all. I found it on ebay for 305 new in box. This was 5 dollars more, and it just felt more *right* to me to get the unlocked processor considering I was going to be running a relatively high-end Z87 board with 1866mhz cas 9 ram.

Haven't tried OC'ing anything yet, just left BIOS defaults and selected the appropriate XMP memory profile.

This chip is lightning fast compared to my old Q6600 @ 3.0ghz. Now that I've got SATA3 available, my SSD is also running at the speed it was designed for:

Windows Experience Index is 7.9 for everything, except the processor at 7.8.

Passmark free trial version on default settings: 4681.1

Processor also runs ridiculously cool with my Hyper 212+ using push/pull fans.

The choice is easy for me, lately I always buy Xeons, or maybe an i3 (yep, supports ecc) if only 2 cores are needed. You get every feature then at least, thanks to the price fixing ecc is barely a premium anymore. (but damn ram is retarded right now)

VT-d is only for pass through which 99% of small VM users don't use but 98% confuse it with VT-x and EPT Honestly having expansion cards support SR-IOV is better than VT-d for the big clusters.

Funny enough, if you don't need to overclock a lot of desktop boards support xeons and sometimes they are cheaper than equal or slower locked i5/i7 models. (unless you live near a microcenter, then the consumer models w/ bundle pricing win every time)

Today, TSX doesn't matter that much, except in the server space. But single-core performance has only increased marginally over the past three generations, which is why a I7-2600k can nearly hold its own against against a I7-4770k.

Since chips have hit a clock limit of ~4 GHz, instead of making the core faster, they are using the die shrinks to include more cores. Consumer-grade Haswell has 4 cores, and it's rumored that the consumer-level Skylake will have 6. And I expect their post-Cannonlake architecture will look a whole closer to Knight's Landing than to Haswell.

As the only way to tap into future increases in CPU power (and thus, the only way Intel can continue to get people buying new CPU's on a regular basis) is to parallelize your algorithms, Intel is tossing TSX out today, but it's true merit won't be realized for a couple of more years.