Initially shrouded in mystery, Pinnacle Africa invited a select group of channel partners and media to the unveiling of Intel's new high end desktop computing microprocessor, the i7 Haswell-E, which according to the American manufacturer, is one the most powerful and efficient offerings on the consumer market today.

In addition to this new processor, Pinnacle Africa also showcased the Haswell-E chipset in conjunction with Asus' X99 motherboard. Furthermore, it was supported by DDR4 memory solutions, a first of its kind for a desktop-specific processor. If that particular setup sounds enticing, you can expect to pay in the region of R60 000 for the entire gaming rig, including an Nvidia GeForce Titan Black graphics card.

Moving onto the Haswell-E processors, Intel say that it is not only meant to appeal to the top tier PC gamer, but also has value in industries where high volumes of computations, or high end graphics processing play an important role. With that being said, the custom Pinnacle Africa unit that was on display, performed exceptionally well with the graphics demands of Battlefield 4.

This was reaffirmed by the range of benchmark tests that Pinnacle Africa ran, with the i7 Haswell-E registering a score of 1703 at 3.75 GHz on Cinebench R15. To put that in perspective, that's 33% faster than the second placed system on that particular benchmarking platform.

Within the new Intel i7 range are three processor options for users to choose from. The bottom of the range, 5820K is clocked at 3.30 GHz, with Pinnacle Africa already accepted orders at R5 573. Sitting up it in the pecking order, is the 5930K, which registers a slightly higher 3.50 GHz and is priced by Pinnacle Africa at R8 223. Should you be eyeing the top of the line 5960X Extreme Edition processor, prepare to pay an estimated R14 819.

There are a number of reasons why it commands such a heavy price tag, chief among which is a listed memory cache of 20 MB shared between eight cores. It is also important to note that these new processors are not backwards compatible, and are specifically designed to work with an X99 motherboard, with Asus' offering being the one favoured by Intel.