A little over 12 months have passed since our reviews of the original unlocked Intel Haswell CPUs, the Core i5-4670K and Core i7-4770K. Rather than release a whole new generation Intel have instead returned to LGA1150 and opted to refresh the Haswell line-up on the now mature 22nm lithography process, in so doing increasing the performance for users whilst holding prices stable.

Alongside last month's Haswell refresh was the introduction of Intel's 9-series motherboards ? in the form of the Z97 and H97 chipsets for overclocking and mainstream markets respectively. An incremental evolution of the 8-series, it brings support for new storage interface technologies as standard in addition to the latest Haswell chips straight out of the box. The 9-series will also support desktop variants of Haswell's 14nm successor, Broadwell, when that CPU is released.