Intel haswell, build advice

So, you may have noticed intel haswell just came out.
I'm not going to into reviews. Haswell uses less overall platform power, and is about 6 to 10% faster than ivybridge at a given clock speed. This is simply build advice.

I helped a friend come up with a build for his computer, so I investigated the available hardware.

As usual, asrock offers a good deal with crap warranties. Asus has high end parts, that cost more. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle.

What threw me off though, was the prices.

Haswell is a terrible overclocker, to be honest. They integrated some of the VRM circuitry into the cpu, which means it's producing more heat in the cpu, though the whole platform uses less power overall. Given that, you have 2 options. Buy an overclocking chip, and get a small overclock, perhaps 4.2ghz with high end cooling, or buy a non overclocking chip and get 3.9ghz turbo. That's 7% difference, btw.

Asus has a feature in their motherboards called "multicore enhancement". Normally turbo will vary the clock speed based on how many cores are being used. Multicore enhancement makes it so the cpu has 2 speeds, maximum turbo on all cores, or idle. That sounds very wasteful, but these cpus use very little power in the first place, so it's irrelevant. If you don't like it, you can turn it off. To be honest, having this feature on makes the computer feel MUCH more snappy.

That means you can have a constant 3.9ghz while gaming with a non overclocking motherboard with a non k model cpu. This is technically overclocking a non overclocking cpu.

K model CPUs don't have a vt-d and vt-x which are virtualization features. Because of the small overclocking capacity of the k models, and the lack of virtualization features, I recommend the non overclocking models.

One thing I noticed, haswell motherboards are cheap!!! OMG they are much cheaper than their predecessors.

Haswell motherboards are considerably cheaper than ivybridge motherboards when they first came out.

For my friend's build, I suggested for him to use the Asus B85M-G (this is a link to the product on newegg). He didn't want raid, or smart response technology, and he only plans on using 3 drives. Given that, h87 would have been a complete waste for him.

Now, you must be thinking... an 82$ motherboard? This is going to be a really crappy computer, right?

Not at all.

Rest of his parts list includes:
i7 4770, this could easily be substituted for a cheaper cpu like the 90$ cheaper i5 4670
4 8gb ram sticks with 20% off coupon. This is massive overkill, I'd recommend 8 to 16GB for most users. If you are building a computer to derp on the internet, I recommend 8GB. Any unused ram will be used for file caching.
Western Digital Black 1TB This is a fast drive.
Western Digital Blue 1TB He wanted a second drive for live recording of games without interfering
Seasonic X650 power supply This is the best power supply you can buy for the job of a single GPU system. You can get away with much cheaper power supplies, but if you have something go wrong, that's your problem. (edit from overclock.net) A lot of people seem to like the seasonic g550, but a warning, from reviews it's either absolutely perfect forever, or dead on arrival. A 650 allows future expansion if you ever in the future on a different build want to go SLI or crossfire.

MSI Geforce 770 This card is a geforce 680 with 7ghz memory instead of 6ghz memory. If this is too expensive for you, a geforce 660, 660 ti, radeon 7870(I am getting really sick of linking things, go google it or something), or 7950 is a good alternative.

Speaking of GPU, intel haswell HD4600 is not a bad GPU in the first place. Sadly, you can't get the fancy intel HD5200 Iris GPU without the cpu coming soldered to the motherboard. If you just want a light gaming box, you could get an i5 4570 with no additional GPU at all. This is also a good media center option.

So wait... talking about a high end gaming computer, with a cheap motherboard? THIS IS BLASPHEMY (or sacriledge depending on your view point)

See, here's the thing. Most people massively over-buy on their motherboard. They think they need all kinds of bells and whistles.

The only thing I dislike about this motherboard is it's audio chipset, and to be honest, it's cheaper to just buy a dedicated sound card. Btw, a dedicated Asus Xonar DG sound card will lower CPU load than any realtek offering.

All in all, the best option is to buy the minimum motherboard for what you need, the best cpu and gpu you can afford, and right amount of ram for the job.

Lesson: Don't waste money on stupid parts.