Test Specs and Methodology

The aim of our initial launch review of Haswell is to determine what advantages the new platform (CPU and Chipset) provide over the previous generation if we exclude the integrated graphics and rely on a baseline add in graphics card, a GeForce GTX460.

Overclocking and Integrated graphics we will cover in a follow-up review.

We selected the Corsair C70 case and 2400 RAM for their value proposition. The C70 offers excellent cooling with its three bundled fans with option for more and is enthusiast friendly. The RAM kit is an affordable entry point for high speed memory and Haswell/Z87 is able to utilise these speeds more effectively than older generations

The motherboard supplied as part of the Intel Haswell Review Kit is a pre-production sample and during our testing we experienced some cold boot issues. The board's watchdog feature would unnecessarily fire on POST and shut the system down or power on failed randomly. Disabling the watchdog feature fixed most but not all issues.

However the overall stability of the board was correct. Performance was down a few % due to the early BIOS and PCB compared to the Retail ASUS Z77 board for Ivy Bridge. In many tests, Z87 was slower than Z77 in pure graphics performance. The board is included for the purposes of running tests on Haswell and we will not focus on it in this specific review.

Our original aim was to test both Ivy Bridge and Haswell with 4 DIMM of 2400 DDR3 as per our Corsair Memory kit to show the strength of both chips memory controller. However the Haswell review kit has a documented errata where 4 DIMM of 2400 or above would cause the CPU speed to drop by 100MHz overall. We therefore tested with only 8GB/2 DIMM in both Haswell and Ivy Bridge

Limited time with the review kit meant we could not do a deep-dive into SATA and USB performance. Basic checks were performed for the USB 3.0 sleep issue and C6/C7 sleep states issue.

For the Intel 'Kinsley' board, the official fix for the USB3 sleep issue is to disable power management on both USB 3 hubs used on the board in windows settings.

Additionally, Kinsley ships with C6/C7 CPU power states off by default as do most other third party boards. Desktop Haswell chips only utilise C7, Intel advised us mobile chips feature up to C10 CPU power state.

We adjusted the following BIOS settings from their defaults.

• Disable watchdog
• Disable boot sound
• Disable network boot
• Disable UEFI boot
• Change cooling to balanced
• Change memory to XMP

The SSD in our machines under test uses the SandForce SF-2281 controller which suffers from poor random I/O performance as well as severe performance degradation especially when the drive fills up.

The Trim feature in SSDs only clears deleted LBAs, it does not reallocate (De-fragment) fragmented files not does it defragment free space. Sequential and Random performance suffers when the drive is in such a 'dirty' condition especially when many write and deletes have been performed on the drive.

Our 120GB Kingston-Sandforce SSD delivers worst case performance of 470 Sequential Read/Write and 160MB/s Random Read. Best case is over 500MB sequential read/write and 220MB/s Random read.

One way to clean the drive up is to delete the partitions before re-imaging the drive. This way the whole drive is 'Trimmed' and cleans for imaging.

The natural actions of running disk intensive tests and installing applications to the test drive degrades it down from the clean state. Suites which incorporate disk tests such as PCMark or Passmark are affected by the different performance.

It is not a real-world use if we cleaned the drive up between each individual test. Not only would it wear the drive out, but the typical user expects dynamic performance from their new SSD

Older benchmarks such as 3DMark2001 are included for legacy comparisons.

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