My Haswell Upgrade

The time had come to upgrade my gaming system. It had served me well for the last couple of years but compute power was lacking for modern games. The obvious upgrade for the best bang-for-the-buck was an Intel 'Haswell' i5 4670K which could be overclocked nicely. I saw an offer from Novatech for £25 off leaving £155 to pay for the CPU. You don't often get really good offers on latest generation Intel processors, so I went for it.

Leaving me with a choice for a new motherboard. I like MSI motherboards and my existing system had one in; unlocking an AMD Athlon X3 to a Phenom II X4 and overclocking it without any problems. I needed an Z87 chipset to be able overclock, so the budget MSI Z87-G43 seemed to hit the spot and gets many good reviews. An order to ebuyer for £88 obtained me one. I intended to build it in my old Chieftec Mesh case which has now held its third set of upgrade components. I replaced to old energy inefficient 600W power supply with the Corsair CX500M modular PSU. The Kingston 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz HyperX Blu Memory Kit will move directly into the new motherboard which will now recognise the XMP settings. A new Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7,200rpm 64Mb cache SATA-III will hold my data for now though I intend to get a 250GB SATA-III SSD in the near future as the system drive.

Construction went well and overclocking to 4GHz went smoothly with MSI's OC Genie in the BIOS. I upgraded the BIOS to the latest version as I couldn't fingd the way to overclock it any further. Still no good as the CPU ratio would not move off Auto. A quick search revealed the trick to use the +/- keys to adjust this value. So now the system is running reliably at 4.3GHz with SpeedStep energy saving and adapative voltage control. I haven't tried any higher as I've achieved my goal with air cooling provided by an Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro rev 2. It is quiet and cool at 60 degrees C.

Performance is amazing, really responsive. I should also mention that I'm still using my old AMD Radeon HD6870 graphics card. I'm having more problems trying to re-install my games than building and setting up the new system hardware and operating system (a brand new copy of Windows 7 Home).