Haswell vs. Ivy in Gaming – The ECS Z87H3-A2X golden motherboard and i7-4770K

Conclusion

There is absolutely no doubt that Haswell is faster clock-for-clock than Ivy Bridge.  Both processors scale similarly but it is noticeable even at the same stock 3.7GHz, that i7-4770K is faster than i7-3770K and the difference becomes more noticeable as the clock speeds go up.  It appears that the approximately “ten percent faster” clock-for-clock means that the more-difficult-to-overclock Haswell doesn’t need to clock as high as Ivy Bridge – Core i7-4770K at 4.5GHz is generally faster in gaming than Core i7-3770K at 4.8GHz.

We also noticed that a GTX 680 is not powerful enough to differentiate i7-4770K from i7-3770K even at 1920×1080 with maxed-out settings that gamers usually choose. However, paired with a really powerful video card like the GTX 780 Ti, the Core i7-4770K is the perfect match for high-end gaming and even multi-GPU and it is noticeably faster at the same clocks over the i7-3770K.  Should you upgrade?  Probably not from Ivy Bridge, but if a gamer is buying a new CPU and motherboard now, the i7-4770K is probably the best choice to pair with a really fast video card or video cards.  And the ECS Z77H3-A2X is a very nice choice for a fully featured motherboard.

ECS Z78H3-A2X Golden motherboard – Pros and Cons

Pros

• The ECS Gank Domination Z87H3-AX2 Golden Board is a beautiful-looking motherboard which accents gold on black in a really nice industrial design without charging a premium.
• The ECS Golden Series is a fully-featured Z87 motherboard with premium components and has proved itself to be stable in over a month of use and able to get a reasonable 24/7 and decently cool-running 4.5GHz overclock on Core i7-4770K.
• ECS does extreme testing on their Golden Boards before shipping and they promise great warranty service if your motherboard ever needs RMA
• ECS gives a 3-year warranty and even offers advanced RMAs and “99-hour” service
• In multi-tasking, encoding and almost every other task that we tested including gaming, the Haswell architecture using Core i7-4770K is faster than the Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K and in turn is faster clock-for-clock than Core i7-920.
• Dual BIOSes are incredibly useful and this is the first motherboard from ECS with this feature.
• Wireless BlueTooth is a great built-in feature.

Cons

• The ECS BIOS could be more fully featured with better options for CPU overclocking.
• The naming of the board could be better.  Gank Domination Z87H3-A2X Golden Board

We feel that ECS has made good progress over the past couple of years in delivering a stable, fully-featured, and very good-looking motherboard that deserves ABT’s Editor’s Choice Award.

We believe that Intel’s Haswell Core i7-4770K is better than the older platform in every way and it will become ABT’s newest testing platform.  All of our evaluations will be performed on Haswell, and we will benchmark games generally at 4.5GHz.

We are looking forward to our follow-up evaluation which will feature Kingston’s HyperX Predator 2800MHz DDR3.  We also expect to be benching a new video card shortly.  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, make sure that you follow us on our ABT forum. You will get the very latest news about upcoming new graphics cards and we are making preparations to attend Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2014) in March. We will continue to benchmark our new CPU and you can also help us on the forum by making suggestions for future evaluations.

Happy Gaming!

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor