Should I wait for Haswell, or just buy Ivy Bridge? Both -> Skylake

kandon

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Nov 25, 2011
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Well, my current system specs are as follows:

Phenom II x4 970 BE @3.5
Sapphire Radeon HD 6950
620w Seasonic PSU
8gb DDR3 RAM
M5a97 mobo socket AM3+ (obviously)

and yeah that pretty much sums up the important specs. However, here is my dilemma:

While my system really doesn't have any problems playing any of the games I personally play (and I don't game THAT much, but I do like having power and no problems when I DO play), I really like having top-of-the-line, and of course my CPU has bottlenecks right now. Comparing it with my friends less-powerful GPU, he still gets more FPS and better gameplay with his Sandy Bridge i7. (For the "I like having top-of-the-line" comment, yes, I bought an AMD, but I didn't really know much about computers when I built it in Q4 2011/Q1 2012).

Now, I am thinking of upgrading basically everything. I don't know whether I should buy Ivy Bridge now and a 7970 while it's cheap now, or wait until Haswell and the new GPUs come out. I don't know exactly when it will be coming out, however my question is more about price/performance. I am NOT planning on getting Broadwell (the next CPU after Haswell). I AM planning on getting Skylake however. So, with my current specs in mind, do you think I should buy stuff now while it's cheap (yes, I know the Ivy/Haswell price difference won't be meaningful at all, but I'm taking the GPU price into consideration. The 7970 was around $550 at launch; compared to about $400 now.)

So, once again I am not going to be upgrading again until Skylake. You could argue that I can get the 7970 when Haswell comes out, however I probably wouldn't look into doing that since more expensive cards would come out (8000/700 series), and I'd just be tempted.

And no, I don't have money growing on a tree, so I won't be doing Ivy and then Haswell or Broadwell.


Short version:

With my current specs in mind, should I upgrade to Ivy and then to Skylake (while GPU price is low) or should I wait until Haswell and then upgrade to Skylake?


Thanks to anyone who answers.
 


Yes I know that Haswell is a new socket but I don't plan on upgrading again until Skylake comes out in 2015 which will use a different socket than Haswell anyways. (At least that's what I heard)
 


Nobody know if it's going to have a new socket, the skylake, usually intel uses two generations in the same socket.
The intel haswell cpus are coming somewhere in June, if you can wait, get the haswell, if not get an ivybridge cpu, either the i5-3570k if you want to overclock or the i5-3470(there're others) if you don't.
Also for the cards, there's no release date announced either for 8000 series from amd or 700 series from nvidia, if you did check the toms hardware news, the amd ones got delayed for fourth quarter of 2013(if 2013).
So you just might get the 7950 or 7970 with the amd never settle deal, which offers two games, crysis 3 and bioshock infinite.
 
There should not be much of a performance increase from IB to Haswell. I'm guessing a roughly 6% - 8% performance increase assuming same clock speed. The i5-3570k is currently on sale @ Newegg for $215, normally priced at $230. No confirmed price on Haswell, but am guessing when they are released the IB Core i5-3570k official street price will drop to $225 while the Haswell Core i5 "4570k" will be priced at $235 - $240. That's not including any retailer premium markup if there is a huge demand. What retailers will actually charge is out of Intel's control.

While there are no official release dates for graphics cards, the AMD Radeon HD 8xxx series is expected to be released in the Summer. nVidia GTX 7xx series is likely to be released sometime during the last 3 months of this year.