Chinese Website Lists Intel’s “Haswell” i7 4770K For Sale Ahead Of Launch

For those who follow our news you may remember we brought you the box art for Haswell desktop processors a few weeks ago and a lot of you commented saying how rubbish it was and that it looked like it had been “photoshopped”. Well unfortunately for you, it wasn’t and this is actually how it will be arriving on the store shelves. Nonetheless it is interesting because we are now seeing most of the Haswell desktop series arrive at Chinese retailers. What they have is probably the entire launch line up, because as with Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge, on desktop launch Intel tends to only release Core i7 and Core i5 models, waiting around 9 months before releasing cheaper the Core i3, Pentium and Celeron models.

The chinese retailer TaoBao and another Chinese retailer are selling the i7 4770K, i7 4770, i5 4670K, i5 4570 and i5 4430 models. These have boxed retail prices of 2599 Chinese Yuan (i7 4770K), 2245 Chinese Yuan (i7 4770), 1749 Chinese Yuan (i5 4670K), 1499 Chinese Yuan (i5 4570) and 1288 Chinese Yuan (i5 4430). Based on current exchange rates this translates into $423, $365, $284, $244 and $209 respectively.

These prices do seem heavily inflated, maybe due to exchange rate differences and pre-order pricing premiums so I would take them with a pinch of salt myself. In fact you can read our article on Haswell pricing here, which seems much more accurate and shows much lower prices. You can also see that the Chinese site is listing four Gigabyte Z87 motherboards for sale with these Haswell processors.

It is clear to see that Intel ‘s Haswell launch is now ramping up to full capacity as retailers are getting their hands on stock. Are you excited for the launch of Haswell? Will you be buying a Haswell CPU and motherboard? Or are they just too expensive given the minor incremental performance boost versus Ivy and Sandy Bridge?

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