Devil’s Canyon Review: Intel Core i7-4790K and i5-4690K
by Ian Cutress on July 11, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Haswell
- i7
- Overclocking
- Devil's Canyon
- i5
- 4790K
- 4690K
Discrete GPU Gaming
When comparing CPUs to APUs, one strength shown by team Blue in the past is the discrete GPU performance. However even when using dual graphics cards at a 1920x1080p resolution, we seem to have hit a wall where extra CPU performance does not necessarily translate to more frames per second. Our results below show little difference between the Haswell processors, and we need to go down to a 2.0 GHz i7 or a 3.5 GHz i3 CPU to see a significant drop in frame rates. The biggest benefit from overclocking seems to be F1 2013 minimum frame rates.
F1 2013
Bioshock Infinite
Tomb Raider
Sleeping Dogs
Company of Heroes 2
Battlefield 4
117 Comments
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Braincruser - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
Rendering should be left to GPU cores in shaders. They scale much much better than cpu.Mark-Benney - Thursday, August 14, 2014 - link
I wrote out a the Manderoot program on a Acorn Electron 32k, Back in the very early days. Took 48hrs to complete up on books with fan placed under it. Lol bet you were not even born when i first wrote program in Dos/Machine code/Pascal/BBC Basic. And still in nappys when I was overclocking a Intel Celron from 233mhz to a stable 24/7 367mhzCrystalBay - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
Thanks Dr. Ian I love my Intel 4790K @ 4.8 Ghz , I also love Asus Z97 Deluxe . This isa the simplest way to OC in my 25 years of building PC's ... Screw it being AVX stable capitol BS never will be used instruction . Any modern chip fails at it anyway ... Go Devils ,go AMDpcjoeyd - Wednesday, February 18, 2015 - link
crystalBay,,, not ANY modern chip fails...just your unstable cpu setup. why run at 4.8ghz and run your cpu super hot? bump it down to 4.6-4.7ghz (you won't notice any difference), run your cpu much cooler and be 100% stable.superjim - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
Intel hasn't made a good OCing chip since Sandy Bridge. Devil's Canyon just reinforces how good SB was. Nearly every i5 and i7 chip could hit 4.4 without issue with most at 4.6+ on a good air cooler. Raise your hand if you're still on SB only because there is nothing better...AlucardX - Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - link
same here. I'm on 2500k at 4.5 GHz. I kept reading this article to try to determine if it was time for a rebuild, and i guess the answer is no. this would be more appealing if the i7 had true 8 core CPU's in itjloutz - Thursday, July 24, 2014 - link
Completely agree with above posts. I'm at 4.5 GHz on closed loop water on a 2500k and this thing has been rock solid for four years (by far the longest upgrade cycle since I started DIY builds in 1998. I believe I got a Microcenter CPU/ASUS MB bundle for ~ $300 (wow!) I've added SSD's and a new graphic card, but still itching for a CPU/MB chipset upgrade. Let's see what Skylake brings to the party??pcjoeyd - Thursday, February 19, 2015 - link
yep, no need to get anything greater than sandybridge as it stands now. I have my 2600k i7 clocked at 4.4ghz super stable and cool. My daughter's pc I have her 2500k running at 4.7ghz. I'm using Noctua NH-U14S coolers in both systems. Rock solid, runs cool and super QUIET!!MrSpadge - Saturday, July 26, 2014 - link
Switched from Sandy to Ivy for the better power consumption under moderate OC (4.1 GHz @ 1.03 V). Running 24/7 load on it, so even stock voltage (1.18 V) is far too expensive.bhima - Sunday, August 3, 2014 - link
Still rocking my i5-2500K at 4.2 on air. I could go higher, but I'm pretty conservative when it comes to OC. I have no need to upgrade as games aren't bottlenecked by my processor, and using the Adobe suite is still a trivial task for Sandy Bridge.