In continuing our Haswell coverage (following up from our "is Haswell worth it for gaming?" post), today we visit the topic of the CPU's most intimate counterpart: the Chipset. As more of you begin to evaluate the place for 4th Gen Intel components in your upcoming PC builds, it's important to understand the various chipsets and their inherent use case scenarios. If you're brand new to all of this and aren't even 100% sure what a chipset is, check out this previous article: "What is a Chipset, Anyway?"

Intel's previous generational tick (IvyBridge), known as the 3rd Gen Intel Cores, operated on the LGA1155 socket with 7-series chipsets. You're all familiar with Z77, Z75, and H77 chipsets at this point, but with the Haswell drop comes the 8-series ("Lynx Point") of chipsets -- and Intel has made a good deal of changes, especially for power and voltage regulation.

In this article, we'll compare Intel's Z87, H87, and H81 Haswell chipsets, talk about the differences, and evaluate what you need for your machine. Let's talk about the major differences between Intel's new family members.

The past month has quite possibly been one of the busiest months in hardware history for recent years -- we've seen the new consoles detailed, GTX 700 line launched, and Haswell drop. And that's just the hardware side of things; gaming certainly doesn't stand still and wait.

For those who recall our Greenlight Spotlight series of videos that highlighted Steam Greenlight games, we've now rebranded the series as what's now called "Hyper HeatSig," effectively a faster-paced, broader-spectrum version of Heat Signature. In Hyper HeatSig, we'll cover several major games worth paying attention to (as opposed to Heat Signature, which just focuses on a single title). We've expanded the scope of the coverage to span all distribution platforms - including Greenlight, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and plain ol' developer websites.

Let's get to it.

For the launch of Hyper HeatSig, we're looking at seven fantastic, new game titles, including Double Fine's Massive Chalice, indie dev Paul Zakrzewski's new spaceflight combat sim, and many other exciting projects and their gameplay. Here's that video:

Haswell's officially been out of embargo/NDA for a few days now, TigerDirect has launched its product offerings, and the internet is abuzz about Intel's 4th Gen processors. After reading through the vast majority of reviews on the web, comparing benchmark results, and studying specs, overclocking, and potential shortcomings, we've built up enough confidence to officially comment on the abounding "is Haswell worth it?" question.

As always, Intel's released around a dozen SKUs of their new CPU, two of which are K-SKU OC chips, the rest are scattered between S-series powersaving or no-suffix "casual" computing. Everything looks great on paper: