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Core i7-4790K Review: Devil's Canyon Tantalizes Enthusiasts

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  • CPUs
  • Intel
  • Processors
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June 9, 2014 11:01:13 PM

Despite a clear performance advantage, Intel just doesn't seem like an enthusiast-friendly company. Certain elements in the organization want to change that perception, though. Devil's Canyon is meant to allay power users with more speed.

Core i7-4790K Review: Devil's Canyon Tantalizes Enthusiasts : Read more

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June 10, 2014 12:06:31 AM

Really nice read. I am very excited to see how well the i7-4790k performed, and that means in 2-3 years the CPUs that will be out are going to be amazing. It will be nice to start seeing stock clocked 4 GHz to 4.5 GHz Intel CPUs to better keep up with the AMD overclocking that many builders do. I prefer Intel and really feel that they offer the best performance for their CPUs.

I built my PC at the end of last year, beginning of this one and went with a i7-4930k. I really wanted a six core processor and have not been disappointed. I have been itching to build another PC because it was really fun to put the plan of components together and although my hands were to big and my medical conditions prevented me from getting to do a lot of the building, my wife helped a lot with that part and it was nice to see the finished product in action. With that being said, I don't have a lot of money for anything right now and hope that my disability pay finally comes through so I can start picking together parts for a computer for my wife. She won't need anything as powerful as I have, and the i7-4790k sounds pretty sweet.
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a b K Overclocking
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June 10, 2014 12:20:27 AM

4GHz base clock on an intel chip wowie
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Related resources
June 10, 2014 1:16:09 AM

The average overclock based upon my Google Doc of about 185 overclocks now averages at 4.55ghz for Haswell. A tim change isn't going to gain an extra 200mhz and even then, it's being generous.

On a side note, this website annoys me. I click to add comment and the default fields are for signing up, no logging in, and when I do, I am back to the homepage. Great.
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1
June 10, 2014 1:18:15 AM

It would've been nice to show benchmarks and temps vs sandy bridge (2600K) at same frequency to help us gauge the progress (or the lack of) that's been made in the last three and a half years.
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10
a b K Overclocking
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June 10, 2014 1:45:01 AM

so one of their biggest selling points ended up resulting in a 6 degree difference.

bring back solder intel.
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13
June 10, 2014 1:53:32 AM

Seriously u should bench it against the old Hex core like 990X, 3930K, 4930K.
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8
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 2:05:34 AM

nice improve :)  please where i put my razor? no way 6ºc improve. my ambient temp hits 45ºc my old 3770k 4.6ghz hit 88ºc on core. with this "new shinning old tech" i can't hit the 4.2ghz. intel miss and miss Hard!
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-8
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 3:39:17 AM

I think that the whole real point of releasing this new processor and the others to follow it is simple. Intel wants to offer a better stock clock for those that do not want to or do not know how to overclock their processor. And since AMD allows easier overclocking, or at least a whole lot more processors that can be overclocked than the ones that Intel specifies for their own products. This will help a lot of consumers decide Intel over AMD if they continue to offer comparative clocks.
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5
June 10, 2014 4:27:08 AM

First problem: 6C between the old and new TIM is something, but not much. As one of the big improvement features, that is disappointing.

Second problem: Why is Tom's using 1.275 V for 4200MHz on both units? Is that actually 1.275v with LLC disabled or is LLC on a setting resulting in the lowest load voltage? If one of those units need 1.275v to be stable at 4200 you have a real donkey sample on your hands. Even the worst i7-4770k are stable at 1.20v @ 4200. Or was the over voltage designed to test an unrealistic incompetent situation to either emphasize or DE-emphasize the TIM difference?
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2
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June 10, 2014 5:55:40 AM

Sorry, but I'm entirely unimpressed. Improved TIM is a waste of time. I thought this was going to release with fluxless solder. 6° worth the wait ? 6° is the difference between air cooling and water cooling.

Voltage wall is still at the approximate same place. Heat is still the limiting factor. I expect some of the better binned 4670K will hit equal or better than the 4690K.

I'll stay with my 3570K @ 4.3ghz - this clearly isn't much of a step up. Looks like I'm waiting for a DDR4 system in a couple years.
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-1
June 10, 2014 6:13:09 AM

In the comparison chart vs the 4770k on page 1, it lists the stock Turbo boost clock for the 4790k @ 4.4Ghz. Why then are you limiting it to 4.2? Seems unfair not to let us see what it's capable of even in stock form!
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June 10, 2014 6:37:47 AM

This is about as exciting as watching grass grow.

Not impressed.
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a b K Overclocking
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June 10, 2014 7:12:07 AM

I'd be more interested in the i5 - 4690K overclocking ability than the i7 - 4790K. As a freelance 3d artist in the architecture and engineering field, I'm constantly running renders/animations that go for multiple days. With a very limited hardware investment budget, an unlocked i5 at the same clocks as an unlocked i7 will run ~15% slower or so once all translations etc are complete, yet the i5 costs ~30% less than the i7.

My interest lies in, will the devils canyon i5 4690k be able to hit the same clocks and temperatures as the i7 4790k at the same voltages, or for the i7 is there just a more extensive binning process or something of the sort? Your comment at the beginning of the article when discussing these realistic and sustainable overclocks really hit home in relation to this.
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5
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June 10, 2014 8:46:23 AM

"You might call the Core i7-4790K Haswell’s Super Saiyan form." - You've just become my new hero.
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6
June 10, 2014 8:48:29 AM

Quote:
First problem: 6C between the old and new TIM is something, but not much. As one of the big improvement features, that is disappointing.

Second problem: Why is Tom's using 1.275 V for 4200MHz on both units? Is that actually 1.275v with LLC disabled or is LLC on a setting resulting in the lowest load voltage? If one of those units need 1.275v to be stable at 4200 you have a real donkey sample on your hands. Even the worst i7-4770k are stable at 1.20v @ 4200. Or was the over voltage designed to test an unrealistic incompetent situation to either emphasize or DE-emphasize the TIM difference?


The point of running both CPUs at the same voltage and the same clock rate is measuring the difference of the TIM. For the rest of the tests, each chip is pushed as fast as it'll go, stably.
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8
June 10, 2014 9:11:56 AM

So where is the variant with 4GHz base clock, without the 'K' modifier, and with vt-d?
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3
a b K Overclocking
a c 124 à CPUs
June 10, 2014 9:25:03 AM


The FX-8350 at stock was roughly the same time as the i7-3770K in your 3DSM fly-by render ...

So why would you go out of your way to compare Devil's Canyon to the A10-7850K ??

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1
a b K Overclocking
a c 99 à CPUs
June 10, 2014 9:49:44 AM

Another few percent faster than the 4770 but at the same price, 6c cooler, and 4.4GHz turbo out of the box. I anticipate some nice OC results with this one.

Still, even though the performance is another step faster than AMD, for my purposes the cost is still a bit high. Still, I'd love to see what it can do at 5.0 GHz.
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0
June 10, 2014 10:07:17 AM

Having jumped from an i7 960 to a 4770K for gaming (both had a GTX 780), and seen pretty much no performance improvement across the board between the 2 (960@4.1Ghz and 4770K@4.2Ghz), I definitely can't buy into this, these are minuscule performance increases overall from my personal experience.
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3
a b K Overclocking
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June 10, 2014 10:31:45 AM

Why on Earth the Noctua NH-U12S? A good cooler, but not the best. They are leaving MHz on the floor! Something is fishy, I think Toms' and Intel are at war.
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-2
June 10, 2014 10:34:11 AM

Yet another worthless miniscule upgrade...no thanks! I think I will be waiting for Sky Lake thank you very much :-)
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0
June 10, 2014 10:45:26 AM

While the lack of competition may limit intels drive to make better chips it does help that at some point power users / gamers will just stop upgrading their cpu and I think slowly but surely intel is feeling that people won't upgrade. Honestly I would not really recommend gamers who are on sandy bridge to upgrade to haswell because it's just not worth it. I think a h100 would be a more economical upgrade then a new cpu.
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2
June 10, 2014 10:50:19 AM

So intel now offers an I7 with a 500 MHz stock clock increase, more overclock over head, and all at the same price as the i7-4770... and most the comments so far have been complaints? Seriously, you people need to get out of your basements. This is amazing.
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4
June 10, 2014 11:25:19 AM

Quote:
So where is the variant with 4GHz base clock, without the 'K' modifier, and with vt-d?


There isn't one. This K model does have VT-d though.
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0
June 10, 2014 11:54:17 AM

epileptic said:
Quote:
So where is the variant with 4GHz base clock, without the 'K' modifier, and with vt-d?


There isn't one. This K model does have VT-d though.


That's exactly the point of my post, but thanks for the answer. It's hard to convey sarcasm in a text only medium.

Edit: Ok. second attempt to edit. Intel updated the ark page for the 4790K, when I checked last week it did not support vt-d. I'm surprised as just about every non-extreme i7 'K' variant hasn't supported vt-d. Thank you for the correction.
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0
June 10, 2014 12:21:01 PM

Is it just me or is this chip just a min/max frequency increase and "delidded".

I get the same numbers on my delidded 4770k... lol And they're calling it a NEW chip?!

Am I missing something here?
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1
a b K Overclocking
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 12:35:37 PM

therogerwilco said:
Is it just me or is this chip just a min/max frequency increase and "delidded".

I get the same numbers on my delidded 4770k... lol And they're calling it a NEW chip?!

Am I missing something here?


Actually makes a lot of sense. They updated the cooling to about match that of a de-lidded processor.
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a b K Overclocking
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 12:36:25 PM

zfreak280 said:
So intel now offers an I7 with a 500 MHz stock clock increase, more overclock over head, and all at the same price as the i7-4770... and most the comments so far have been complaints? Seriously, you people need to get out of your basements. This is amazing.


The point is it isn't anywhere close to groundbreaking like we hoped, so it's a bit of a letdown. I'm sure a number the people who are leaving negative comments would buy one if they weren't running a sandy bridge or above.

For gamers and 95% of other users, the 4690K is the chip to buy, because the 100$ premium for the hyper-threaded i7 isn't worth the money from a performance standpoint. 50% more cost for sub-5% performance gains (talking about gaming FPS)? No thanks - that extra 100$ is going into a better GPU. Hence, your 4.0ghz stock setting doesn't really apply, because most will buy the 4690k and overclock it to the same 4.3-4.6 the i7 chip will reach (AKA no improvement from the Haswell 4670K - silicone lottery and more expensive coolers notwithstanding).

If fluxless solder was re-introduced, we might see some more 5ghz range overclocks which makes the enthusiast sector exited and gets bonus points on the nerd scale. Intel could get there if they were motivated to do so. Now the disillusionment is setting in, and false hopes and the months of anticipation is all for naught.

At the end of the day, if I buy a 4690K I will get close to the same clocks and near identical performance with the same limitations of my single GTX 770, hence not worth a $350-400 upgrade.

Guess we will all have to wait for the DDR4 and multiple 16x PCIe lanes of the future.

Edit : The more overclock headroom is where you are completely missing it. There is no more overclocking headroom compared to the 4770K, period. Stock clocks are somewhat irrelevant for a "K" series chip. You might get an extra 100-200mhz which is boring...

I would rather see a 4690 @ 4.0ghz and not bother overclocking
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2
June 10, 2014 12:56:10 PM

I always love these articles, but I wish you'd post approximate costs of the Test Systems. I sometimes run it thru PCPartPicker.com, but it'd be nice to get a rough idea what your systems would cost ^^
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June 10, 2014 1:16:32 PM

Intel is getting better. Someday I'll find a reason to upgrade my i7 980x
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a b K Overclocking
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 1:27:07 PM

kittle said:
Intel is getting better. Someday I'll find a reason to upgrade my i7 980x


I think the Skylake with the 128MB Cache will do the trick!

It is supposed to be stupid fast.
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0
June 10, 2014 1:27:40 PM

I was hoping this was the excuse to finally move off my i7 920. Now I'm feeling maybe wait for Haswell-E (or beyond)? I don't really need more than 4 cores but maybe the extra lanes will be helpful given the coming PCIe based storage solutions?
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1
a b K Overclocking
a c 185 à CPUs
a b å Intel
June 10, 2014 3:10:09 PM

To the complainers:
I thought the article was very well written, and that Intel did a great job of the refresh.

What many people seem to not get is that it is a SUSTAINABLE overclock we are looking at. Sure some people got up to 4.7GHz on their i7-4770K's but as said this is NOT the norm.

Jumping from 3.9Ghz to 4.4GHz for the default settings is to be commended. If people keep complaining that even this is unacceptable perhaps Intel won't even bother in the future to give us what we're asking for.

Seriously, what does it take to keep people happy?
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1
June 10, 2014 3:15:41 PM

"Intel just doesn't seem like an enthusiast-friendly company"

What a stupid thing to say. The enthusiast isn't the guy rushing to pay an extreme premium for something new with 1% gains, the enthusiast is the guy who studies processor manuals and patches machine code with a hex editor. Truly, Intel has always been highly supportive of enthusiasts.
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a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 4:05:47 PM

An enthusiast is a person who does things because of self joy & fun, even if it's not the most practical thing.. Like water cooling...I think you have your definitions mixed up buddy.
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a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 4:05:58 PM

An enthusiast is a person who does things because of self joy & fun, even if it's not the most practical thing.. Like water cooling...I think you have your definitions mixed up buddy.
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June 10, 2014 6:10:23 PM

Overclocking headroom on these haswell cpu's is LARGELY related to how much RAM is installed. If you just have 2 dims of 4GB each, it will overclock like a champ. However if you fill all 4 dimm's, the weakness of the "Mainstream" on die memory controller comes into fruition.

@Toms, take half the ram out and rerun your test. Also removing Turbo and all those C-States will greatly increase stability. it has in my experience with my 4770K on a Maximus VI Extreme.
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0
June 10, 2014 6:12:42 PM

Also another thing people dont realize is, the K series SKU's are usually the worst binned cpu's of them all. All the good shit gets binned to the 45w SKU's.
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-1
June 10, 2014 7:09:35 PM

Gonna stick with my i5-2500k @ 4.6ghz
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2
a b K Overclocking
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 7:15:04 PM

2500k might go down in history as one of the best cpus ever. i bought mine 3.5 years ago for 180 dollars, clocked it to 5ghz and it still holds damn strong.

at the time, sandybridge was a pretty big leap over previous generations. markets were good, so parts were cheap comparatively to today and then development completely slowed down for the desktop enthusiast. was really the perfect time to buy into a desktop pc.
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4
a b K Overclocking
a c 185 à CPUs
a b å Intel
June 10, 2014 7:44:32 PM

GAMING:
People seem to forget that GAMES have largely been bottlenecked by the graphics when using modern Intel CPU's. AMD has a lot of issues, but if you got a good Intel CPU (like the 2500K) there's been very little incentive to upgrade.

Don't blame Intel for that, it's a multi-threading issue that's only now being really addressed aside from games like BF4 that did a good job of it.

I intend to keep my i7-3770K for at least another three years with an upgrade of the graphics card to a GTX880 or GTX980 at some point. I'm quite happy NOT to have to upgrade my core system.

I am also very happy with the POWER IMPROVEMENTS Intel has made. I'm in a room that gets very hot much of the year and the extra 100Watts the FX-8350 would add was unthinkable.

I think the i7-4790K is a truly awesome CPU for those who are due for an upgrade, otherwise I largely don't care and again I'm happy NOT to need to.
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2
June 10, 2014 7:52:54 PM

Gonna stick with my i5-2500k @ 4.6ghz
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1
a b K Overclocking
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 7:54:29 PM

Dam... I really thought it would be soldered.
I'll be keeping my 2700K. Looking forward to high-end "Maxwell" GPU's even more now ...nothing else to get excited about.
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2
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 8:11:44 PM

Is anyone else a little miffed that Intel has just started using better TIM, something they should have done in the first place, and passing it off as a new line of cpus? Granted, they OCed a bit as well, but still..
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2
a b à CPUs
June 10, 2014 9:15:41 PM

A good review. Seems to be a small step up from the original flagship that doesn't cost Intel much extra. Power consumption went in the wrong way though.
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0
June 11, 2014 12:46:19 AM

As powerful as this cpu might be i'll be keeping my i5 750 for a while more. Even though it has a bit more than 4 years now, it still does rather well at 3.8Ghz when compared to newer stuff.
Some might not agree but indeed CPU technology seems to be stalling a bit. Imagine saying in 2004 that regarding the new cpu technology there was no reason to upgrade from your AMD Thunderbird 900 Mhz, or in 1994 saying that you're still fine with your i386 or first generation of i486.
I'm not saying that there were no such people, just making a statement that cpu technologies evolution from 4 years apart isn't so great at the moment that makes you really want to upgrade.
Opinions may differ.
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0
June 11, 2014 2:07:22 AM

Overclocking has become totally useless, lots of cons and no benefits. Don't get me wrong, overclocking is OK if someone does it for fun or for bragging rights, but certainly is not as it was in the old days. The reason behind overclocking was to get a significantly more powerful system with a moderate cost.
What are the benefits of (sustainable) overclocking on 4790K vs stock?
about 2-3% more performance and that´s all. Nobody is going to notice a 2-3% performance improvement over stock, much better to invest the money in SSD, RAM, GPU.
What are the cons? extra $ on a unlocked CPU, extra $ on cooling, about 15% more power consumption over stock, in many cases a noisier system, and a potentially shortened processor life.
As others have pointed out, 2500K was the last CPU where overclocking was worth the effort.
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3
June 11, 2014 2:08:54 AM

Overclocking has become totally useless, lots of cons and no benefits. Don't get me wrong, overclocking is OK if someone does it for fun or for bragging rights, but certainly is not as it was in the old days. The reason behind overclocking was to get a significantly more powerful system with a moderate cost.
What are the benefits of (sustainable) overclocking on 4790K vs stock?
about 2-3% more performance and that´s all. Nobody is going to notice a 2-3% performance improvement over stock, much better to invest the money in SSD, RAM, GPU.
What are the cons? extra $ on a unlocked CPU, extra $ on cooling, about 15% more power consumption over stock, in many cases a noisier system, and a potentially shortened processor life.
As others have pointed out, 2500K was the last CPU where overclocking was worth the effort.
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0
June 11, 2014 2:27:25 AM

So basically, in simple terms 4790k is just an overclocked version of 4770k?
The higher the clock speed is, the hotter the temperature goes and much power is consumed.
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-1
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