I am in the same boat as the OP - I am a gamer and into latest heavy shooters and am ready with 2200$ for an upgrade. But I think if I go with 6 core haswell-e it will be better as I only change my PC every 5years + I want to have DDR4 Ram... Still what u all think does an 4770/90 enough... ?
Also, when can I expect mobos with DDR4 support, its 9 series chipset, isn't it ?
I could say on DDR4 -- "Your guess is as good as mine," but we'd seen this phenomenon before as we jumped from DDR to DDR2 to DDR3.
I am only guessing that the DDR4 boards will get their roll-out with Haswell E, but then -- maybe not. That's three-way coordination required in a marketplace. The memory makers have to be "ready to go," the board makers have to be "ready to go."
There is also a prospect of board releases made for DDR3, and possibly even "AC-DC" boards that can swing either way. But the printed wisdom says that DDR4 is going to be "more expensive." "MOre expensive" always occurs with a new memory-standard roll-out.
I'm loosely planning to build a Haswell-E. I had originally planned to build an IB-E system with a "mature" X79 motherboard release. It's a catch-22: the X79 chipset is old -- originally designed for Sandy Bridge E; I have G.SKILL modules ready-to-go for quad-channel X-79; we'd expect Haswell-E to offer some advantages over IB-E. So what do you do?
It's like the end of "Dirty Harry" where Clint taunts the psycho. You're either going to skin that smokewagon now, or bide your time. Frankly -- I'm always uncomfortable when they roll out a new memory spec, but it's happened four or five times in my enthusiast experience, so . . . nothing new.
PS I thought the new chipset for Haswell-E would be named "X99." You can check that, but it's what I recall off top of my head.