Intel Core i7-4790K – Devil’s Canyon Review and Overclocking

Heading the pack of Intel’s new Haswell-refresh range of processors is the Core i7-4790K, which essentially is still the quad-core Haswell processor that’s built on Intel’s 22nm process technology but with a few changes.

The DC range of Haswell processors come with improved thermal interface material (TIM) and this change could improve cooling performance. It also has added capacitors to the back of the processor to improve power delivery.

The Core i7-4790K (and also the Core i5-4690K) comes with support for both Intel’s VT-d virtualization IO technology and Intel’s TSX-NI transactional memory instructions.

Processor Details

Here’s a quick summary of the Intel Core i7-4790K.

Full details at Intel ARK.

CPU-Z capture.

Here’s the CPU-Z details of my overclock.

Test Setup & Overclocking

The Engineering Sample used in this review doesn’t seem to be one of those great overclockers. I’ve read other reviews on how they only managed to squeeze 4.7Ghz with 1.36 vcore – I can could reach 4.7Ghz but it will fail the test barely even halfway through, with temperatures barely hitting mid 80c. The ES here however is very comfortable at 4.6Ghz with 1.30 vcore.

Benchmarks

I disabled turbo boost for the test, running all cores at maximum rated clock speed.

x264 – 10bit to 8bit Video Conversion

The source video is a 720p MKV file that is 90 seconds in duration. x264 settings at the slowest.

Cinebench R15

Default settings

Sorry, no results from the other processors as they were done on an older version of Cinebench that uses different unit measurements.

WinRAR

Speed of archiving some almost 1GB worth of CR2 and MOV file.

Power Consumption

Power Consumption measurement is based on readings taken from watt-meter. Power consumption is based on entire system, the FX systems are paired with the Radeon HD 6670 graphic card for video output.

Temperature

goldfries.com’s lab temperature is set at +/- 25°C

The Verdict

The Intel Core i7-4790K is expected to retail at the last price of the i7-4770K which is around RM 1,100 while the i7-4770K’s price would be lowered.

Enthusiasts or casual users, upgrading from the i7-4770K to i7-4790K doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all as i7-4790K has a 500Mhz increase from the i7-4770K’s base and Turbo boost clocks.