A lot of these guys (ie - critics) are talking total BS. They are just arm chair theorists. My personal experience is something different. Only a few days ago, I 'upgraded' from an FX9590, Crosshair V Formula Z, 16GB@2400MHz and a pair of Sapphire TRIX 290's in Xfire to the new 4790K and Asus z97ws mobo. I went for this mobo as it is dedicated towards graphics power (4xPCIE3 lanes and you can run a pair of PCIE3 gfx cards, both at x16 speeds).
Since Friday 21/09/14 it took two days to build this damn intel rig (everything the same except mobo and cpu). I had so many problems, wouldn't get into BIOS, fatal error messages, chassis intrude messages, etc. This damn thing kept crashing like a cancer patient. Finally got it up and running (in stark contrast, all of the AMD rigs I have built for myself and family/friends have never given any trouble from 1st boot onwards).
Anyway, I did some benchmarking of the 4790K (performance passmark score = 5304 versus FX9590 = 3355).
Firemark extreme (4790K & 2x290's = 7693 versus FX9590 & 2x290's = 7562). So very little improvement.
I just ran crysis3 on ultra settings and I am getting 40-59fps with the 4790K on the opening mission on the ship (I have a 144Hz monitor). BUT when I had my FX9590, I was getting a solid 70-80fps on the opening mission (in fact it never dipped below 70fps). So far I am unspeakably disgusted with this inhell-4790K.
It scores highly on some synthetic benchmarks but when I test it with real life benching (gaming for me is the main thing), it scores noticeably less than my FX9590. I shelled out £250 on the 4790K and £250 on the z97ws. I fell for all of the intel hype and was expecting a massive performance increase. I didn't get it. In fact, it is scoring a lot less than my FX9590. That is £500 of my money down the toilet. I am going to run some more real life bench tests and see what I get.
The only benefits I can see so far, is that the 4790K is substantially cooler than my FX9590 (22c idle versus 40c idle). My pc is much quieter now (fans no longer on full whack). Also, it is faster in single thread work than my FX9590.
The z97 platform will support the new Broadwell cpu (tbr September 2015). I recommend you hold fire, bearing in mind my costly experience. Will run some more bench tests, see what I get and then decide if I am going to keep this new intel platform or go back to my trusty, no BS-hype FX9590 platform.
grimmjow660 :
So after doing some research, I found the Fx 8350 gives better performance than even a 4930k if Mantle is activated. But other benchmarks say the 4790k has better performance than an 8350. So would getting an 8 core cpu with Mantle on an R9 290 be better than a 4790k with an R9 290?
Kinda feels like the 8 core would be better with it's more cores