Intel Core i7-4790K or Intel Core i7-5820K

[JT95]

Should I spend the extra money to get a Intel Core i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.3GHz LGA 2011-v3 140W BX80648I75820K Desktop Processor or just get the Intel Core i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon Quad-Core 4.0GHz LGA 1150 BX80646I74790K Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4600. Thanks

 

[sharramenafte]

Just if you don't know, if you would pick the 5820k, you would pay for it, brand new x99 motherboard, a good 9xx Series NVIDIA Gpu, DDR4 memory. You could pay 1,000$ more just for all of those. 4790k is better in gaming, if you are going to use it for that, 4790k is the best for it. 5820k has lower speed cores which is more into heavy duty editing. Definitely the 4790k. Get that.

 

[i7Baby]

Depends on what you're going to be doing with it. For gaming the i7 4790k is a much cheaper and better proposition.

 

[atomicWAR]

The only reason to step up to a x99 build for gaming is if your running 3 or 4 GPUs... or you want to run dual GPUs with an M.2 SSD and then you would want the i7 5930k for the PCIe lanes as the i7 5820k only has 20 PCIe lanes compared to 40 PCIe lanes of a i7 5930k. The i7 4790k only has 16 for example and you would only want to run dual GPU or single GPU with an M.2 SSD...ideally IMO

Point being is i agree a i7 5820k isn't the best gaming pick out there.

 

[Neutr1n0]

I kind of disagree and i do think the X99/5820K is a solid choise, even for gaming. Indeed everything above i5 4690K is overkill right now, but that can change...

I don't mind spending a bit more on mobo+cpu+ram as i upgrade it only after several gpu upgrades. My i7 920 on X58 platform was way overkill at the time i bought it 6 years back, but still it bottlenecked my gtx770 when i bought that 5 years later. (The bottleneck, experienced mainly in bf3/4, was partially fixed when OC'ing from stock 2.66Ghz to 3.4Ghz with clearly noticable average fps increase, but still there as min fps and 'smoothness' also increased noticably when going to X99 with 5820k)

Let's asume that in 5 years you'll pair this rig with latest GC GTX1370 or whatever and connect that to a, by then standard, UHD or 4K monitor. Presumably games will be better multi-threaded by then as well. That's a whole other story not?

I like to think that i will keep this rig (X99 with 5820K) 1 or 2 years longer than I would if I went for Z97 with 4690K/4790K. That will (at least partially) make up for the extra cost.

The frequency difference between 4790K and 5820K can be easily overcome. Both are haswell and both will overclock to sililar frequencies. 5820 a bit less on average as it has more cores. My 5820K went easily to 4.5G. I don't see it loosing on fps for any game against any stock clocked CPU on the market. Not that it would make any REAL difference right now anyway. Anything above stock clocked i5 4690K won't add more than a couple of frames. Fast forward a few years though....

 

[sharramenafte]

I kind of disagree and i do think the X99/5820K is a solid choise, even for gaming. Indeed everything above i5 4690K is overkill right now, but that can change...

I don't mind spending a bit more on mobo+cpu+ram as i upgrade it only after several gpu upgrades. My i7 920 on X58 platform was way overkill at the time i bought it 6 years back, but still it bottlenecked my gtx770 when i bought that 5 years later. (The bottleneck, experienced mainly in bf3/4, was partially fixed when OC'ing from stock 2.66Ghz to 3.4Ghz with clearly noticable average fps increase, but still there as min fps and 'smoothness' also increased noticably when going to X99 with 5820k)

Let's asume that in 5 years you'll pair this rig with latest GC GTX1370 or whatever and connect that to a, by then standard, UHD or 4K monitor. Presumably games will be better multi-threaded by then as well. That's a whole other story not?

I like to think that i will keep this rig (X99 with 5820K) 1 or 2 years longer than I would if I went for Z97 with 4690K/4790K. That will (at least partially) make up for the extra cost.

The frequency difference between 4790K and 5820K can be easily overcome. Both are haswell and both will overclock to sililar frequencies. 5820 a bit less on average as it has more cores. My 5820K went easily to 4.5G. I don't see it loosing on fps for any game against any stock clocked CPU on the market. Not that it would make any REAL difference right now anyway. Anything above stock clocked i5 4690K won't add more than a couple of frames. Fast forward a few years though....

So the conclusion is that these processors don't have much difference on today's hardware. A few years later (5 or 6) there is going to be much better hardware and the both i7's would be an equivalent of a 6 year later average i5. Both are pretty good processors, top of the line Intel CPU's, but all hardware will fade in time.

So the pick is:
Build for gaming: i7-4790k
Build for work in photoshop or video editors: i7-5820k

Always remember that more cores support working, and higher speed cores support gaming. Good luck on your pick, hopefully you will get a good batch. Don't forget to overclock 😛