Reviews - Intel Core i7-4790K 'Devil's Canyon' (22nm Haswell)

[DanceswithUnix]

Hardly beats my i7 920. wake me up when Intel finally makes a CPU thats 70-90% faster clock for clock in every way.

I think those days are gone. Application specific accelerators will get added in, like we already have video encoding, encryption, visualization & positional audio. Other than that, we are seeing deeper queues, more cache and tweaks to the pipelines. Process shrinks don't give automatic performance improvements any more. Give it another 5 years and I expect x86 to be 20% faster per clock and maybe touching 5GHz, hardly enough to notice.

I'm surprised Intel haven't tweaked the encryption instructions for BitCoin. That might cause some ripples

[Kovoet]

Was going to sell my i7 2700k and asus formula v mobo to upgrade with this new chip. Now wondering whether it is worth it.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Was going to sell my i7 2700k and asus formula v mobo to upgrade with this new chip. Now wondering whether it is worth it.

Honestly,with things like Mantle and DX12 in the next year,together with the main multi-platform engines threading better,your Core i7 2700K has some life left in it still,especially if overclocked IMHO.

[j.o.s.h.1408]

Agreed. Even a 920 will do

[Agent]

The problem is that the bigger die was a production sample of an IB Core i5,obtained by the company which took the pictures. The earlier picture is of an engineering sample(many reviews use these like Hexus for example),meaning there is a distinct possibility that reviews were testing a chip not representative of what you could actually buy.

It's also a possibility that the ES chip was simply part of their process to work towards a final retail chip. The change could have been last second for all we know.

I'm not trying to defend Intel here, I really don't care about them any more than AMD, but there are so many possibilities and general speculation that it's impossible to state that they were intentionally misleading anyone.

[Agent]

I'm surprised Intel haven't tweaked the encryption instructions for BitCoin. That might cause some ripples

I really don't think it would make a difference given the insane speed and mass production of ASIC based systems now. By the time they got into peoples hands, and people were generating coins, the value would be of little consequence unless a huge part of the die was dedicated to it.

[DanceswithUnix]

I really don't think it would make a difference given the insane speed and mass production of ASIC based systems now. By the time they got into peoples hands, and people were generating coins, the value would be of little consequence unless a huge part of the die was dedicated to it.

Really should have googled that before I posted

https://software.intel.com/en-us/art...sha-extensions

So SHA support goes into Skylake. Now that isn't going to make you rich, but if it is energy efficient enough to have it ticking away while you are surfing etc and it makes rather than loses you money then potentially every PC can be adding to the global hash rate.

Got to be at least more useful than Physix?

[Xlucine]

How hot would you expect a 4770K to run under the stock cooler and being fed 1.152v? The review mentions the 4790K ran at 88 degrees compared to 78 degrees for the 4770K, but that was with the 4770K at 1.08v

[eatonm62]

Was going to sell my i7 2700k and asus formula v mobo to upgrade with this new chip. Now wondering whether it is worth it.

Honestly,with things like Mantle and DX12 in the next year,together with the main multi-platform engines threading better,your Core i7 2700K has some life left in it still,especially if overclocked IMHO.

I have the 2600k running arount 4.5Ghz and was also wondering if it was time to upgrade, I guess I shall hang onto my cash for a bit longer.

[dimz]

Why not use the latest stable or beta Catalyst drivers though... Catalyst 14.4 (the latest stable version) has been out for at least a month and there's also 14.6 beta availlable. Unless there's only one motherboard available for APUs at the lab, shouldn't be that hard to update, nor is it particularly hard to add the non-present devices system variable and remove old display adapters from device manager.

APUs aside, shouldn't there be a comparison with AMD's FX offerings, binned or not?

[Kovoet]

I have the 2600k running arount 4.5Ghz and was also wondering if it was time to upgrade, I guess I shall hang onto my cash for a bit longer.

I've done it for one reason. The formula vi is a gorgeous board and happy with it. Got it the 4770k running at 4.2ghz easily but the best thing is the new bios