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

How We Tested Core i7-4790K

Architecturally, Core i7-4790K is the same as its predecessor. If you want to know more about Haswell, check out The Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn.

Really, our purpose today is comparing the previous flagship to Intel’s most recent effort. With that in mind, I ran both CPUs in stock and peak-overclocked form through the newest build of our benchmark suite.

Obviously, the overclocks on both processors represent a limited look into what you might get in the wild. What I can say, though, is our Core i7-4770K is a retail-purchased processor that I snagged from Newegg (and not the press sample we were using previously, which hit 4.7 GHz). It better represents what many of our readers report: using strong air cooling and 1.275 V, four cores are stable at 4.2 GHz, with more lightly-threaded workloads running up to 4.5 GHz. It’s hard to apply significantly more voltage and not run into thermal issues, so we tend toward settings that (ideally) won’t do as much damage to the CPU over time.

My Core i7-4790K is a press sample. Nevertheless, it’s not an outrageous overclocker. I was able to get it up to 4.6 GHz across all four cores using 1.31 V, with single-threaded tasks jumping up to 4.8 GHz. In this case, it appears possible to apply higher voltages to dial in a more stable/higher overclock. However, we’re still apprehensive about going much higher than 1.3 V on Intel’s 22 nm process.

All tests are run on MSI's Z97 Gaming 7 motherboard running the latest 1.3 firmware. We populated all four of its memory slots with 4 GB modules, dropped in a GeForce GTX Titan graphics card, and hooked up Samsung's 840 Pro SSD.