# Is buying a Haswell laptop worth it?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [October 6, 2015, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679 "2015-10-06T02:46:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2015, 2:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679/1 "2015-10-06T02:46:56Z")
> [@Wikipedia](#):
>
> [Haswell (microarchitecture) - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_%28microarchitecture%29)
>
> Compared to Ivy Bridge:
>
> ```
> Approximately 8% better vector processing performance.[9]
> Up to 6% faster single-threaded performance.
> 6% faster multi-threaded performance.
> Desktop variants of Haswell draw between 8% and 23% more power under load than Ivy Bridge.[9][10][11]
> A 6% increase in sequential CPU performance (eight execution ports per core versus six).[9]
> Up to 20% performance increase over the integrated HD4000 GPU (Haswell HD4600 vs Ivy Bridge's built-in Intel HD4000).[9]
> Total performance improvement on average is about 3%.[9]
> Around 15 °C hotter than Ivy Bridge, while clock frequencies of over 4.6 GHz are achievable.[12][13][14][15][16][17]
>
> ```
According to this, there’s not much difference in Haswell. Is it worth paying $70 or more for laptop with one, compared to Ivy Bridge?
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### Author:  [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2015, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679/2 "2015-10-06T03:28:38Z")
Haswell dates from 2011. Skylake was released just this past August.
Just what are you planning to do?
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### Author:  [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2015, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679/3 "2015-10-06T03:37:50Z")
In general I’ve found that notebooks that tend to run hot often have shorter lifetimes. It usually pays to go for newer, lower wattage power CPUs in notebooks.
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### Author:  [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2015, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679/4 "2015-10-06T13:32:06Z")
I don’t push the laptop very hard, I guess. I don’t ask great game performance, and even cheap laptops have graphics chips now that rival the mid-tier cards from 10 years ago, so many games work. I think I probably have to get over myself and either go with the slower Haswell, or get an Ivy Bridge, which will be more in the price range I wanted, I think.
About the cooler CPUs, do I read the article above correctly, that Haswell is actually hotter?
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### Author:  [@Cardinal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cardinal)
#### Post date: [October 7, 2015, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679/5 "2015-10-07T17:16:22Z")
Just for the record, if this thread is found again, I’m told by my IT friend that Haswell is a good jump in power management, especially when it’s essentially idle, and it’s not to be judged just on the numbers I posted.
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### Author:  [@Beelzebubba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Beelzebubba)
#### Post date: [October 8, 2015, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-buying-a-haswell-laptop-worth-it/733679/6 "2015-10-08T01:58:18Z")
Here’s a great comparison of the Haswell and newer Broadwell CPU architecture-
> **[The truth about Intel’s Broadwell vs. Haswell CPU](https://www.pcworld.com/article/428249/the-truth-about-intels-broadwell-vs-haswell-cpu.html)**
>
> We test identical notebooks with Intel's 4th-gen and 5th-gen CPUs to see how different they really are.