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?