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

[SessouXFX]

Cynics! Cynics everywhere!

Seriously, the only way some of you would be happy, is if you're running at 7GHz stock with 45w at a cool 23- C max. Of course it would have to be $100 or less.

That's why I can't buy into the criticism of Intel. Every year they're slowly improving their product, and every year, we have people barking up the tree, hoping for cats to come raining down on top of them.

Now, I never been a huge fan of Intel, and would prefer that AMD does a better job on their end. But guess what? AMD is doing their thing, knowing they can't compete.

Both parties know this, and so do we.

You're asking for huge leaps in technology, hoping for, hell, I don't know, one of these chips to open up a Star gate for all I know. But compared to where CPUs were 5-10 years ago, we should be thankful that Intel is still going forth with making these chips.

Intel could have very well prescribed with the foolish notion that PCs are dead, just like MS and handed everything over to ARM.

If you're trying to make everyone happy, the end result is nobody will be happy.

 

[rickzor]

Cynics! Cynics everywhere!

Everyone is entitled to his\hers own opinions, but calling cynic to make a point gets us nowhere.
I believe that what most people think here is that these are really small incremental steps from the last cpu release, so small that to be honest my 4 years old cpu is almost up to the same tasks that these are.

What people really desire now is not another cpu incremental evolution, but rather a almost cpu revolution like we had with the Core2Duo back in 2006. What a huge leap that was back then...

 

[vertexx]

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.
.

Hmm, that's not the way I'd calculate the value difference. Really, the question you should be asking is "How much is your time worth?".

So, if you average $25/hr as a freelance artist, and an animation that renders "for multiple days" takes 15% longer on an i5 vs. i7, then assuming "multiple" means 2 days, or 16 working hours, an i7 would save you .15 * 16 hours * $25/hr = $60/job. So under these calculations, the i7 more than pays for itself after the 2nd job. Of course these calculations are not exact, because the rendering is running 24hr/day, but generally speaking, you should get the idea that a 15% savings in rendering time is well worth the 30% additional expense of an i7.

If you really want bang for your buck, you should take a look at the Xeon E3 1230v3.

 

[siman0]

Ill be honest this is acting exactly like my 4770K with cool labs liquid ultra as TIM @ 4.0.

 

[ceh4702]

Well there is definitely a need for a really fast processor for certain specialized tasks like animation and video production and of course the all important gamers. However, a lot of people might also like to see a really good integrated video package on an I-7 and an I-5 as well. Not everyone is really a gamer. Seeing better TIM results could help all of the product lines. This is something Intel should have done 2 years ago for all their processors.

 

[dwatterworth]

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.
.

Hmm, that's not the way I'd calculate the value difference. Really, the question you should be asking is "How much is your time worth?".

So, if you average $25/hr as a freelance artist, and an animation that renders "for multiple days" takes 15% longer on an i5 vs. i7, then assuming "multiple" means 2 days, or 16 working hours, an i7 would save you .15 * 16 hours * $25/hr = $60/job. So under these calculations, the i7 more than pays for itself after the 2nd job. Of course these calculations are not exact, because the rendering is running 24hr/day, but generally speaking, you should get the idea that a 15% savings in rendering time is well worth the 30% additional expense of an i7.

If you really want bang for your buck, you should take a look at the Xeon E3 1230v3.

I appreciate the reply, but I think your assumption is that render time is the same billing as modeling time and that it is on a single machine. I've been slowly amassing left over machines from my day job, building other stuff from used parts or crazy deals on retail sites etc to build a render farm. As the business grows, I've just been looking more and more at moderate, sustainable overclocking to 1. reduce render time 2. reduce the overall number of machines I need to use 3. reduce power consumption.

I was so interested in Devils Canyon hoping that the increased thermal transfer efficiency would allow slightly higher clocks with less costly cooling. The Hyper 212 evo is pretty much my bread and butter in a push/pull setup so I don't have to worry about the box going down if a fan kicks the bucket. Everyone seems to be talking about gaming here, and I totally understand the cynics knocking the last few generations since to them, with a proper GPU, you won't see much improvement at all in most games. Heck, I've still got a DP Asus Z7S-WS with (2) E5472 chips that is still a viable gaming machine if it wasn't headless.

I'd love to be able to put up the extra $120 to step up to the i7, but the amount charged for rendering wouldn't see the payback for quite a while, but if the i5 could get within striking distance after a moderate overclock, that was more my interest.

 

[XngXtuHl]

What the hell Toms?
Compared only to Core i7-4770K ?

 

[neon neophyte]

What the hell Toms?
Compared only to Core i7-4770K ?

what else would you need to compare it to? it is an improved 4770k, so all we need to know is how improved

 

[MANOFKRYPTONAK]

Read a second review, still not much over sandy... I really was hoping these chips would hit 5.0-5.5 on air (pipe dream). Intel isn't giving me any reason right now to upgrade. Hopefully haswell-e, or something AMD is worth writing home about...
No maxwell yet either this is a slow slow slow time in tech...

 

[RedJaron]

Really? No jokes yet about six degrees of separation?

 

[gsxrme]

*fart* Still not leaving my P67 with my i7 2600K @ 5.1Ghz and my ram running @ 2400Mhz cas9

 

[soldier44]

I'm still humming along with a Sandy i7 2600k at 4.4 and Z68 board. Was waiting for the right chip to upgrade to be worth it to see a difference. I may wait a little longer for Intel's native 8 core coming at end of the year.

 

[babernet_1]

I'm still humming along with a Sandy i7 2600k at 4.4 and Z68 board. Was waiting for the right chip to upgrade to be worth it to see a difference. I may wait a little longer for Intel's native 8 core coming at end of the year.

Yes, but those 8 cores are at 3.0 GHz with the same thermal ceiling as the six cores. If you look at core usage of games, one core is maxed out and the remaining have maybe 25% usage. The 4790K overclocked could very well be faster on any game and nearly as fast on threaded applications.

If you look at G***3D, the overclocked 4790K is about as fast and sometimes faster than the hex core 4960X. And that's with threaded tasks and at about 1/3rd the cost.

 

[Michael Irvin]

Nice article, but I wish they had included the i7-4790 in with all the benchmarks. The i7-4790 is certainly cheaper ($25) than the i7-4790K, comes with VT-d (i7-4790K does not support it) but comes at a lower clock frequency (4.0GHz vs. 3.6GHz).

 

[neon neophyte]

4790k has vt-d though earlier versions of k processors did not (like sandybridge)

 

[Michael Irvin]

4790k has vt-d though earlier versions of k processors did not (like sandybridge)

You are right ... I missed that, thanks.

Intel Ark (i7-4790K)

 

[babernet_1]

What effect will vt-d have?

 

[howiejcee]

I'm about to assemble a new Haswell system and am not afraid of "delidding" either CPU (when using the delid die guard from the MSI Z97 XPOWER AC).

I'm really curious to see what the delid typical, max OC values are between the 4770k and the 4790k.
Various reviews make it seem like the 4790k needs significantly higher voltage when OCing vs the 4770k.
If this is true, then one might as well delid the 4770k and go for a higher OC.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would the 4790k require higher voltages to OC unless the addition of smoothing caps affected this or something else has changed (or the engineering samples are not representative)?

Hopefully more reviews of the actual retail/production units will shed more light.

 

[howiejcee]

What effect will vt-d have?

Straight from Intel:
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) continues from the existing support for IA-32 (VT-x) and Itanium® processor (VT-i) virtualization adding new support for I/O-device virtualization. Intel VT-d can help end users improve security and reliability of the systems and also improve performance of I/O devices in virtualized environments.

 

[babernet_1]

What effect will vt-d have?

Straight from Intel:
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) continues from the existing support for IA-32 (VT-x) and Itanium® processor (VT-i) virtualization adding new support for I/O-device virtualization. Intel VT-d can help end users improve security and reliability of the systems and also improve performance of I/O devices in virtualized environments.

I read that, but what does that mean to us flunkies?

 

[In3rt1a]

What effect will vt-d have?

Straight from Intel:
Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) continues from the existing support for IA-32 (VT-x) and Itanium® processor (VT-i) virtualization adding new support for I/O-device virtualization. Intel VT-d can help end users improve security and reliability of the systems and also improve performance of I/O devices in virtualized environments.

I read that, but what does that mean to us flunkies?

Better performance in VMs.

 

[neon neophyte]

it lets you use hardware directly in a VM enviroment, if i am not mistaken

 

[SessouXFX]

Cynics! Cynics everywhere!

Everyone is entitled to his\hers own opinions, but calling cynic to make a point gets us nowhere.
I believe that what most people think here is that these are really small incremental steps from the last cpu release, so small that to be honest my 4 years old cpu is almost up to the same tasks that these are.

What people really desire now is not another cpu incremental evolution, but rather a almost cpu revolution like we had with the Core2Duo back in 2006. What a huge leap that was back then...

That moment won't likely be seen again for a very long time, if ever. We're talking Moore's Law here. We're near the very end of the line when it comes to reduction. the Law of Physics has a threshold and Intel is still dealing with that threshold with the 14nm process. And as we've seen the last few years, the improvements are incremental at best.

I'm not saying one can't dream of better things in the future. But taking a good look at reality, that Brick Wall is staring back at us. It's best to assume it has no intentions of allowing us to breakthrough it without a very long and gruesome fight.

Truth told, I think Broadwell is the end of the line for Power users. But I certainly never claimed to have an all seeing eye. What I think they should do is continue to improve on what they have, instead of trying to find the very bottom of the pit. But what they'll continue to do is try to improve bit by bit.

The Revolution is over, Intel won.

 

[mapesdhs]

dwatterworth writes:
> 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. ...

If you're doing that kind of work on a limited budget, you'd be
better off building an X79 setup from used parts (where sensible).
I built such a system recently, ASUS P9X79 WS, 3930K @ 4.7,
32GB @ 2133, Quadro K5000, two GTX 580s, Corsair H100i, HAF 932,
various SSDs (Samsung 840 250Gb for C-drive, Sandisk Ultra Plus
256Gb for AE cache, Samsug 830 64GB for Windows paging file),
2xx 2TB Enterprise SATA (RAID1), 1TB Enterprise SATA (general data),
1475W PSU (Thermaltake Toughpower XT Gold, only cost 100 UKP!),
new Nanoxia/Bitfenix fan replacements for the included Corsair &
Coolermaster fans, etc. Ended up being a really nice, quiet and
very quick machine. The K5000 alone save more than 700 UKP vs.
buying new, while the two 580s provides the CUDA power of a 780Ti
(for AE/etc.) at a fraction of the cost.

I'm building another system atm, 3960X, 64GB/2400, Quadro 4000,
one GTX 580 3GB, similar storage setup, same cooler/case/fans,
1200W PSU, etc.

Ian.

 

[mapesdhs]

qlum writes:
> 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. ...

I've been saying this for months. People commented last year about the drop in PC sales, etc.,
assuming it was due to users moving to tablets & suchlike, but in terms of revenue I'm sure an
important factor is that for those with money to spend there's nothing worth buying beyond a
good SB/SB-E setup. Even many top-end X58 users still say they don't see the point yet.


> Honestly I would not really recommend gamers who are on sandy bridge to upgrade to haswell
> because it's just not worth it. ...

For performance, yes; I keep obtaining 2700Ks, ASUS M4E(Z)s, they run happily at 5GHz
every time, nice setups (Antec 300 with better fans), no need for insane cooling, though I
use an H80(i) with two Nanoxia fans so it ends up being fast but very quiet. Done four of
these builds so far; sold one to an engineering company with a Quadro 4000, 32GB ,
840 Pro, Enterprise SATA, etc. - smoked the modern 1S XEON Dell they'd been considering
for their CAD tasks, and half the cost.


> I think a h100 would be a more economical upgrade then a new cpu.

Yes, that's exactly what I did, replaced a VenomousX with an H100 (P55 setup), replaced
a big Phanteks with an H110 (3930K system).

The main attraction of Haswell is the larger number of native Intel SATA3 ports (Marvell
SATA3 controllers suck!), USB3, etc. I can see why some would upgrade for these sorts
of issues. For gaming though, over an existing good SB setup, the gains are minimal.

Put it this way, I bought a used Gigabyte X79 board and a 3960X for less than the cost
of a new Z97 and 4790K. For multi-GPU gaming, with all the issues involved with the limited
PCIe lanes on all mainstream desktop boards, the result is far better. As I say, the only
thing that sucks is the limited Intel SATA3. Oh Intel, why don't you make a simple PCIe
card using your own SATA3 controller?? I'd buy a stack of them to fit into older systems,
it'd be so much better than the useless Marvell controllers (is ASMedia any better? Not
tested yet...), and no need for drivers either as the existing INFs/IRST would pick it up
no problem.

Ian.