The following chart reflects power consumption throughout our benchmark suite, which gets logged every two seconds. The long, straight section at the end represents 30 minutes of idle time inserted by our automated script to better reflect actual use when we calculate averages.

It's pretty clear that going from Core i7-4770K to -4790K increases power consumption under load. That much we expected. More strange is that the stock Core i7-4790K doesn't settle into the same idle state as the stock -4770K (or even the overclocked -4790K, which does drop down around 50 W). It's possible that MSI's Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard isn't properly dropping into the right C-state by default, correcting the behavior only when we overclock manually. We'll take this into account as we present the next chart, though.
The other observation we make is that consumption rises noticeably once we apply more voltage and a higher clock rate to the Core i7-4790K. No surprise there. Let's have a look at how average use is affected.

The above chart includes a couple-thousand data points averaged together for each CPU. I specifically factored out the idle time, though, due to the obvious anomaly suffered by the stock Core i7-4790K. We'll keep things fair and stop short of running efficiency numbers. But when these CPUs are churning through our scripted benchmark sequences (all of the applications presented on the preceding pages), you can see how big of a difference there is between them. Overclocking takes the Core i7-4790K up an extra 20 W, on average. And that's on top of a 15 W increase going from stock Core i7-4770K to -4790K.
Of course, these are still systems with 16 GB of DDR3 memory and a GK110-powered GeForce GTX Titan. Power consumption is hardly what we'd call egregious.
- Intel Core i7-4790K: Devil's Canyon Is For Enthusiasts
- Overclocking Core i7-4790K And TIM Performance
- How We Tested Core i7-4790K
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Content Creation
- Results: Adobe CC
- Results: Productivity And Media Encoding
- Results: Compression Apps
- Results: Power Consumption
- Core i7-4790K Adds Enthusiast Appeal To Haswell
bring back solder intel.
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.
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.
bring back solder intel.
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?
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.
Not impressed.
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.
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.
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 ??
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.