Purchased this as a much needed upgrade for my PC, used to play games on. Used with an ASRock Extreme4 z77 motherboard, it is very quick while at the same time using very little power (77W TDP). It also runs fairly cool, idling I get temperatures of about 40oC on all 4 cores, while under very heavy load (stress testing with Prime95) it reached maximum temperatures of about 70oC, which is well within safety limits, all on the stock cooling solution.
Installation was very quick and easier, far less troublesome than I expected, the notches in the side of the unit make it very obvious how it should be oriented within the socket. The cooler had thermal paste preapplied to the heatsink, which I used without a problem. The cooler is pretty quiet too, I would not say there is a noticable increase in the volume of my PC over my previous processor (very low-end dual core Amd Athlon thing).
I have yet to come across a game it has struggled to run coupled with a decent graphics card, I can run games such as Bioshock Infinite and Metro: Last Light on their highest settings without a hitch (both very recent, high end games). I actually now experience screen tear in games such as Dishonored my frame rate is so high as a result of this processor. Its performance on the desktop is also excellent, everything loads up quickly and smoothly and it's great for browsing the web and using photo editing programs and the like.
I have not attempted to overclock it (yet) so I cannot comment on how well it OCs but it is very stable at the stock frequencies so with a decent aftermarket cooler I should imagine it can be overclocked very nicely.
In my opinion you won't need anything more costly than this for gaming any time in the near future, i've had absolutely no problems with it and I cannot recommend it enough!
P.S When switching chipsets, Windows cannot recognize your new hardware and blue screens on startup, the only solution is to reinstall Windows unfortunately, HOWEVER this is NOT an issue with this CPU and so does not count as negative point to it. 100/100 stars easily.
| Brand | Intel |
|---|---|
| Product Dimensions | 10 x 10 x 4 cm; 200 g |
| Item model number | BX80637I53570K |
| Manufacturer | Intel |
| Processor Brand | Intel |
| Processor Type | Core i5 |
| Processor Speed | 3.4 GHz |
| Processor Socket | LGA 1155 |
| Processor Count | 1 |
| Computer Memory Type | DDR3 SDRAM |
| Wattage | 77 watts |
| Are Batteries Included | No |
| Item Weight | 200 g |
| Guaranteed software updates until | unknown |
