
In a surprising turn of events, Intel’s Core i7-4770K claims its first and only gaming victory in World of Warcraft. Or maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. This is another notoriously processor-limited title with documented issues on AMD hardware. It looks like the A10 might still be playable at 720p. But it’s symbolic that Haswell, which we know only gets faster when we look at the BGA-based, Iris Pro Graphics 5200-equipped mobile version, already wins in this test with 20 execution units.

The frame rate over time is notably choppier in WoW than the other titles we’ve tested. With that said, Core i7-4770K spends most of its time up above 40 FPS, while A10-5800K hovers in the mid-30 range. Core i7-3770K dips into the mid-20s too often for our tastes.

Haswell again fares well, though playing through WoW at this setting is clearly too much for the HD Graphics 4600 engine to handle. Dialing down to Fair quality might help.

Relative to the other processors we’re testing, Core i7-4770K compares pretty well. In absolute terms, however, almost 14 ms of variance between consecutive frames is palpable. Fortunately, HD Graphics 4600 averages closer to 5 ms at 720p. The experience on AMD’s A10 is noticeably more jittery, particularly in our flight path-based benchmark where the animations are expected to be smooth.

Average and “worst-case” variances alike quickly balloon. This is actually a good representation of how frame time variance and the impact of inconsistent pacing manifest in a game. Naturally, when you’re looking at a tenth of a second difference between the time it takes to serve up one frame and the frame next to it, the effect is exaggerated. But there’s certainly no denying it’s there.
- Haswell Turns Into Intel's Fourth-Gen Core Architecture
- HD Graphics 4600: 3D And Quick Sync
- HD Graphics 4600: Impressive OpenCL
- HD Graphics 4600: Battlefield 3
- HD Graphics 4600: BioShock Infinite
- HD Graphics 4600: Hitman: Absolution
- HD Graphics 4600: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- HD Graphics 4600: World of Warcraft: Mists Of Pandaria
- Intel 8-Series Chipsets: Z87 Is Nice
- Overclocking Haswell: You’ll Pay For That
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Adobe CS6
- Results: Content Creation
- Results: Productivity
- Results: Compression Apps
- Results: Media Encoding
- Power Consumption
- Core i7-4770K: Did I Shave My Legs For This?
Also thought I recently heard somewhere of others getting Nice 5GHz+ OC's on water and Very low vcore's - perhaps you guys have a Poor batch?
No one will be reading it.
SoC is pushing it a bit given it doesn't contain RAM, USB, network, etc.
But with Haswell, the world has gone backwards. Apparently, a 4770k can be pushed to 4.4GHz and that's it. That's a 7% reduction in clock speed. Since most benchmarks don't show a 7% improvement at stock, Haswell is slower than the Ivy Bridge that it replaced.
For years we've been hearing that the answer to all our tech questions is "you have to wait for Haswell for that". But as this article shows, that was a lot of hot air.
Finally, AMD wins on price AND performance.