graphics performance of i5-4670K

[Bill@W]

Any members used this chip in a system WITHOUT a PCIe graphics card? Intel makes extravagant claims for the on-chip graphics, and I'd be interested in any user's comment. I'm about to assemble an i5-4670K on an Asus Z87-Pro board. I use 2 monitors, do audio and video editing, but have no interest in gaming. I would value any comments, since up until now on-chip graphics have not been worth much.

[Bonebreaker777]

If no interest in gaming but rather multimedia and work with it the a i5 paired with Quicksync will be good.
Not sure what kind of feedback you are expecting but the Intel IGP is good as it gets.
Hardware supported encoding and decoding.Cool.Inconsequential power comsubtion.Overclockable and upgrade-able(OC the core Iin BIOS and OC the memory).
Problemless drivers.
From a Sandy Bridge owner.
Right now I have a Haswell i5 PC, let me know if you are interested in anything.

[kalniel]

Not sure what kind of feedback you are expecting but the Intel IGP is good as it gets.

Sorry, but that's complete nonsense.

The IGP is an HD4600. It is sometimes utterly trounced by the IGPs in recent AMD processors.





OP - what is your non-gaming use? The AMD IGP is faster at many types of compute, but not all. Video editing is one where quick sync (as per the HD4600) does do very well, but check the benchmarks for your exact software.

[DanceswithUnix]

If your motherboard can drive your two monitors then you have nothing to lose trying.

Many people get a graphics card just to escape Intel's video drivers, in which case the drivers are the same for a £20 card as they are for a £200 one so it doesn't cost much.

[gogoyippy]

I was going to go with purchasing almost a "place holder" graphics card till I had the funds for a proper one for £20. I google'd it but it doesn't seem to say whether a graphics card was necessary for the 4670k, not sure if this is common knowledge I don't know

[teppic]

Intel's been able to make grand claims about the IGP in Haswell because in prior releases it was absolutely awful. Double performance from awful isn't quite as catching in marketing, especially when a £60 AMD APU has better graphics than a £275 Intel CPU.

[DanceswithUnix]

I was going to go with purchasing almost a "place holder" graphics card till I had the funds for a proper one for £20. I google'd it but it doesn't seem to say whether a graphics card was necessary for the 4670k, not sure if this is common knowledge I don't know

It is only necessary if you are playing games (performance), doing professional work (workstation features) or running something that causes the Intel drivers to crash so hard you have to turn it off and on again. Perhaps that isn't so common any more, I don't intend finding out.

[AETAaAS]

I tend to agree with DanceswithUnix, Intel drivers have caused nothing but headaches for me. Most recently, they have caused strange problems with my laptop. Odd flickering and actually causing some games to run more slowly despite using my 7970M card, and not just a little bit, it caused GTA4 to go from about 40FPS down to 8FPS. It made no sense to me and I was thinking that it was the Catalyst drivers initially and tried a couple versions including the latest beta.

I later found out that the iGPU drivers caused this problem for some users and tried endless combinations of drivers from Intel, Windows and the laptop's original drivers then finally settled on an older Intel driver which doesn't cause problems.

I'm not sure which programs you use. Some are well suited to OpenCL and GPU acceleration, the former of which, AMD's GCN does very well. Heavily multithreaded jobs like encoding x264 will be better served by something like a FX-8350 or an i7 if your budget allows.

[AJRDLawrence]

Don't sweat it. You will want something suitable to meet your needs, but just use the integrated graphics until you can afford a decent discrete GPU. That is what I did in 2011 when I built my current rig.

I couldn't afford to build my PC all in one go so I got it a few bits at a time. I was stuck using the intel HD 3000 on my i5-2500K for a good fews weeks, but hey, at least it put a picture on the screen and let me use my new toy in the meantime. It even worked quite well for playing Half-Life: Source and Half-Life 2 @ 720p.

Contrary to the others here I've had no problems with intel drivers whatsoever, neither have my friends, many of which built an almost identical PC around the same time as I did.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I had the Core i3 2100 soon after launch and it had texture corruption in L4D when I tried running it. Moreover,one of the german sites showed that the HD3000 was not rendering all the shadows properly in one of the games they tested. Image quality during gaming was a major issue with the SB IGP AFAIK,and it took IB and Haswell to improve in those areas.

Intel has no doubt improved on their drivers and game compatability in the last few years but AMD and Nvidia are still better.

If it is just for bog standard display stuff and playing back videos you should be not having any issues TBH,with the Intel IGPs in the last few years though.

[Bill@W]

I’m grateful for all the useful comments posted. What prompted my original query was that I’ve bought a Lian-Li case PC-A05FNB (I used Lian-Li cases for my last 4 builds and for me there’s none better). This case is tight with maximum space of 280 mm for a graphics card. I looked for an Nvidia PCIe 3.0 card smaller than that, and there are not a lot. Since I have no interest in gaming, I wondered if the i5-4670K would have the on-chip graphics oomph that Intel claims.
After digesting the negative comments about Intel graphics drivers, I’m leaning towards the Asus GTX650TIB-DC2-2GD5 (215mm), or the Asus GTX650-DC-1GD5 (259mm). These are really gaming cards, which I have no need for, but I like Nvidia drivers for a multi-display setup, which I find useful for photo-editing.

[teppic]

I wouldn't bother with that - for basic multi-screen work the most basic £20 PCI-E cards are sufficient.

[Bonebreaker777]

Slightly sad to see all the issues with Intel IGP. Mine works flawlessly.
But I tend to agree with the last comment.
If you are not after the gaming or computing performance but only multiple screen support (which works for me again without issues) or HD/UltraHD decoding, cards around £20 will be perfect for you.
Choose a silent one. AMD 6450 tend to be good.