The Intel Core i7-4770 features Intel's most recent (Haswell) architecture. As with each of the previous "Core i" generations Intel have managed to reduce power consumption and simultaneously increase processing throughput. The i7-4770 has a locked multiplier which makes overclocking it much harder than its unlocked i7-4770K sibling. Comparing the 4770 and 4770K shows that the 4770K yields 14% higher processing throughput when overclocked and also costs 14% more. The 4770K has 4 physical cores which allow it to process four streams of instructions in parallel. General desktop computing tasks such as checking email, watching videos and surfing the web rarely require more than two cores, so for the majority of users this processor is overpowered. If you plan to encode video or compile software then this is one of the fastest reasonably priced processors available. [Mar '14 CPUPro]