[section_title title=”Introduction”]

Introduction

It’s finally here, Intel’s latest CPU codenamed simply “Broadwell” and today we have decided to pitch the new unlocked i7 model up against the previous i7 flagship model for socket LGA 1150; I am of course talking about the new Intel Core i7 5775C and Core i7 4770k processors!  You may have noticed I have decided to emit Devils Canyon from this quick shoot-out; there wasn’t really a performance increase, certainly not one worth adding into this, time is “ticking”, get it?  Of course you do!  So here we are, welcome to our shoot out and Intel Core i7 5775C Review.

So what’s actually new with Broadwell?

With Haswell and Broadwell essentially sharing the same socket and chipset (LGA 1150 and Z97 respectively), a couple of additional features which are pretty interesting have been added to the new Broadwell range; worthy of upgrading though?  Well, the first major mprovement is the introduction of the Iris Pro 6200 integrated GPU which replaces the HD4600 graphics found on the now older Haswell processors.  The next improvement is via Quick Sync in the shape of the VP8 decoding support and also features 2 separate bit stream decoders; this essentially allows one ring to focus on decoding allowing the other free to encode at the same time without a huge performance drop.  This is some pretty neat stuff, especially for those relying on Quick Sync for game streaming, or even just general rendering/encoding etc.

Possibly the biggest difference between the Intel Core i7 4770k and i7 5775C is the TDP; Intel have decreased the rated TDP from 84w on Haswell, to 65w on Broadwell; this should improve efficiency and of course potentially allow for some overclocking headroom (less power = less heat in theory).  Broadwell is also based on the new 14nm die as opposed to Haswell which is based on the 22nm die; the first major die shrinkage in a couple of years in terms of CPUs, but does it make that much of a difference early on?

Now without boring you all who came for the figures without being overloaded with technical jargon, flick to the next page to see our testing methodology for our Intel Core i7 5775C Review…