When Intel announced their upcoming product line-up at GDC, we were excited about the new Haswell refresh. Codenamed Devil's Canyon, available mid-2014, Intel promises a new and improved thermal interface material for the Haswell processors. This is a response to the series of complaints from enthusiast users who find Haswell to overclock worse than both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, Haswell's 2nd and 3rd generation predecessors. When reading the news, we could not help but have a look at our overclocking database and look at the overclocking capabilities of the various overclocking SKUs.

We extracted the average overclocked frequency for a wide range of processors, limiting the cooling to air only, as well as limiting the benchmark selection to multi-threaded applications only. These include for example Wprime and Cinebench, but also the latest 3DMarks. Based on well over 30,000 results, we can see that the second generation Core series, Sandy Bridge, are still by far the best for overclocking. We can see the Haswell based processors about 400 MHz behind!

We are looking forward to seeing the Haswell refresh with new TIM bring higher overclocks. Hopefully even better than Sandy Bridge!

(click to enlarge)