Results: Productivity And Media Encoding
Tuning Core i7-4770K up to 4.2 GHz (using the four-core Turbo Boost setting) has a nearly 10 percent impact in our FineReader OCR workload. From there, the stock Core i7-4790K shaves off a couple of seconds more, while overclocking further whittles away at the completion time.
Same story in Visual Studio. This time around, the overclocked 4770K and stock 4790K nearly tie, which is the outcome we'd expect from two processors able to push four cores at a consistent 4.2 GHz. Nudging the clock rate up to 4.4 GHz across four cores gives Devil's Canyon an additional edge.
This is the only page with single-threaded tests, but TotalCode Studio isn't one of them. The bump you get from overclocking Core i7-4770K is easily replicated (and then some) by a stock Core i7-4790K.
The same goes for HandBrake, though the performance improvement is even more pronounced. From stock 4770K to stock 4790K, we report an almost 11 percent boost.
From the factory, a Core i7-4770K jumps as high as 3.9 GHz with one core active while the 4790K gets up to 4.4 GHz. That 500 MHz difference translates to an improvement of almost 12 percent. Pushing Devil's Canyon's clock rate up to 4.7 GHz knocks another couple of seconds off of the completion time.
Our iTunes test is similarly set up to utilize one core. The percentages work out to be fairly similar to LAME: expect double-digit gains from the frequency headroom freed up by more effective cooling.