Is Haswell worth the wait?

Hey guys, I'm in a bit of a situation here. I am starting my graduate program in August and will require a reliable and durable laptop for work.

I will mainly be working with excel, powerpoint, and word. On the side I will use the computer to watch HD videos, and play some MMOs casually; games like Guild wars 2 / FFXI / World of Warcraft, nothing to demanding.

I have my heart set on a Lenovo laptop mainly because of the comfortable keyboards on their Thinkpad Edge series. I know that current Edge Series 14 inch laptops all come with the Integrated HD 4000 graphics. I have seen some videos on youtube regarding this chip, it seems passable for my needs. Guild wars 2 runs fine on it as well as some older games.
I also know that haswell is right around the corner, and is estimated to be a significant graphics performance boost over Ivy Bridge. Additionally, Haswell is said to be better on battery life and heat.

My main issue is that I am not sure just how long it will take for the Haswell chips to make their way to Lenovo's Thinkpad Edge line. From what I have been reading Haswell is due to release sometime next month. I need the laptop to work roughly around the second week of August. That leaves about 6-7 weeks of time for the Haswell chips to make their way to Lenovo's Thinkpads. I feel as though it is unlikely that this will happen within this time limit.

Additionally, I currently have the option of buying an Ivy Bridge Lenovo laptop that does what I need it to do for about $100 off original price (i.e., $700 laptop for $600) before taxes. I do not know how Haswell will affect the price of laptops in the future (i.e., increase or decrease for similar performance).

One final huge issue is the fact that I do not like Windows 8, nor do I want a computer with Windows 8. Currently I still have the option of choosing windows 7 with Lenovo when I buy a new machine. I do not know if this option will remain available in a few months once Haswell is part of Lenovo's line up.

So that's essentially my situation.

1. I need a laptop for work
2. I need the laptop by Early August
3. I need the laptop to work primarily, but secondly I want to run casual games on lower settings and HD video on it as well.
4. Current Ivy Bridge is just enough for my needs but... if I wait a few months Haswell is estimated to not only meet my needs but also exceed them, which would be awesome.
5. If I wait I may not be able to get a computer with windows 7
7. Budget is $650 roughly.


What do you guys think?

Any advice would be great.


Thanks.

 

If you intend to game, it's worth the wait IMHO. Haswell is also supposed to improve battery life significantly. Windows 7 is a good question. Worse case you should likely be able to buy your own copy and install it as long as drivers are available.

 

I do have a really and I mean really old and really slow netbook that I could use temporarily if I had to wait a month past august. I can't honestly imagine writing 30 page papers and working on excel spreadsheets on a 10 inch screen with a resolution of 1024x600 though.

 

That's what an external monitor is for.

Notebooks should start getting updated as of next week, as long as it's not a ULV CPU.

 

Oh yeah I know, I Have a desktop at home that is my primary gaming and work machine. I just need a laptop for work in the office / grad classes / presentations for the classes I will be teaching. I will probably spend about 15 hours a week using the laptop and about 20- 25 hours a week on my desktop.

I am not as computer savvy as many here, what is a ULV CPU?

 

ULV is the "Ultra Low Voltage" CPU, really just lower voltage than the common CPU's. They usually have lower peak boost speeds and have lower base clock speeds, but they also draw less power at load and run cooler (usually).

What Lenovo are you looking at right now?

 

(correct me if I am wrong) They are the under clocked versions of processors that tend to be put in ultrabooks, sacraficing a bit of performance but improving battery life. Regular processors are usually too demanding for an ultrabook if you want it to last more than a few hours so ULV CPU's are used. Taking the macbook air and macbook pro CPU into consideration, the air has a 1.7ghz (or 1.9, one of those) i7 processor while a macbook pro has a 2.9ghz i7 processor.

 

Customize your ThinkPad Edge E431 Laptop | Lenovo | (US)

That is the computer I am currently looking at getting. With the i5 processor and 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD. Whatever the price comes out to I can get it for $640 out the door with taxes included (Includes fingerprint reader as well).

 

Ah, that will likely be updated with the new CPU's sooner than later for sure. That's a regular 35W dual core CPU.

 

Awesome, do you think that the price on it will increase significantly once the upgrade happens?

 

Who knows. Most places usually have "back to school" specials in July or August including the new tech.

 

I see your dilemma. And agree it is one. The closer we get to Haswell the more waiting makes sense. I read the GPU boost might be nice for you? So yea what to do.

I am less worried or concerned about the cost you can get currently. The new release I think would either have great effect on making it better cost or if not much effect I do not see price increase. So if you wait I do not see you paying more for what you are currently working on. But you could get a Haswell. It is hard even impossible for any of us to know if that exact model will get a Haswell update in your time frame. I do not know but I guess if a guess it is not the low end first. As such a $650 unit I guess maybe not so likely. But as I said I hardly see Haswell pushing up the cost of that unit.

My final answer is I tend to agree with HT, because I don't see a downside and there might be an upside so to speak.

Good luck.

Edit: I assume as far as OS goes you could get W7 cheap if need be?

 

I have a question regarding point no. 4: IB is enough for your needs performance wise, or battery wise? What is your main priority in laptops: performance or battery life? If it's the former, it's not worth waiting for Haswell, because it will not offer any significant performance increase compared to IB; if it's the latter, it is worth waiting for Haswell, as it will offer significant improvements in power efficiency, making laptops run longer on battery.

I had a dilemma similar to yours: I didn't know, whether to wait for Haswell and new GPUs or not. I knew exactly what I wanted though (a Clevo machine with AMD dGPU) and I had quite clear laptop usage scenario (I don't use laptop on battery much, so battery life is not a very important factor to me, I need more of a portable computer). After some leaks over the Internet about small performance increase of Haswell vs IB, and virtually no performance increase of 8970M vs 7970M, I decided to buy a current generation laptop.

 

the other plus on waiting is the price reduction on past models, I do remember that the edge is usually the first out when the new cpus come, since they arent that well engineered as the real deal

 

To be honest for me Performance > Battery life by far. I will only really be away from an outlet for 4 hours at a time. The standard battery on the laptops go for roughly 5 hours so this shouldn't be an issue.

Here is just one of the articles where it clearly describes a huge performance boost between Ivy Bridge and Haswell. I also saw a video on youtube a few days ago where they said that it would be something like a 20-25% boost (quite significant).

Intel's Haswell gets massive graphics performance boost | PCWorld

 

There will be massive performance boost in Haswell, but only in the iGPU field. CPU tasks will not be executed much faster than in IB. As I mentioned in my post, I wanted a specific type of laptop with a discrete GPU, so performance of iGPU didn't matter to me at all. I understand, that in your case it's all a bit different. I assume that you will only have iGPU in your new laptop. In this case it's worth to wait for Haswell, especially that there is not much time left for the official release.

I should have mentioned this in my first post, sorry for the confusion.

 

Be weary of manufacturer claims on battery life. I'd check actual user input on battery life. 5 hours is likely minimum brightness, no wi-fi, completely idle. Turn up screen brightness any, turn on wi-fi, do any amount of processing power, you can expect 50-60% of that amount of battery life, not to mention battery wear over time it will degrade.

And as Marecki_clf explains, the performance boost will be significant with the iGPU but Intel claims up to 50% improvement in battery life (for ultrabooks at least). For such a system you're looking at, likely still 20-30% improvement in battery life if things work out as Intel claims.

 

Yep, I don't think Lenovo even offers the option to put a discrete graphics card in their Thinkpad Edge series. I will be mainly depending on integrated graphics.

 

I called Lenovo to ask directly when the new Haswell chips would be in the Thinkpad line of products, as expected I got the run around and standard "We do not know that information" from every sales rep I asked.

I guess all I can do is estimate at this point.


Does anyone here know about how long it took for Ivy Bridge to become mainstream in notebooks after it originally released?

I know that Ivy Bridge came out around May-June of last year — at least according to a quick google search — but I do not know when exactly they started to penetrate the main stream laptop market as the dominant chip.

 

that covers it, consumer are released first, followed by the semi enterprise class, and the real enterprise class comes latter, than we have new mid life designs, and then we have mid life crisis and buy a porsche