Intel Core i7 4790K “Devil’s Canyon” Processor Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Intel’s Core i7 4790K has an MSRP of $339 and can currently be found at Newegg for $339.99 and Amazon for $339.99. In the UK Scan Computers are selling the Core i7 4790K for £260 and Overclockers UK for £270. At the time of writing Amazon UK are not selling the item but third party sellers are from an extortionate £310. The Core i7 4790K comes with a three year warranty when bought in a retail package or a 1 year warranty when bought as an OEM chip.

Overview

Anyone expecting to see a drastic improvement in overclocking and temperatures with Devil’s Canyon will probably be quite disappointed. As we have shown temperatures are slightly improved but overclocking results are still very much silicon-dependent. As a result temperature improvements can easily be wiped out by needing extra volts on bad overclocking chips. The reality is overclocking results are pretty similar on the 4790K to the 4770K, as you might expect, but temperatures are slightly lower at those same clock speeds when using the same volts. I still believe that Intel needs to move back to the days of fluxless solder. Anyone who remembers “the Golden days” of overclocking with Sandy Bridge will be familiar with Fluxless solder: it is what allowed Sandy Bridge 2600K’s to reach 5GHz on air with no issues at all. When Intel first moved from Fluxless solder on Sandy Bridge to Thermal Interface Material (TIM), on Ivy Bridge, overclocking performance tanked as temperatures soared. Haswell and Haswell Refresh still continue this trend. How do we know it’s the TIM? Because Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E both use fluxless solder and from our testing they both delivered similar temperatures at similar overclocks with similar volts. Of course, it doesn’t matter how low your temperatures are if the chip can’t overclock any more then temperatures aren’t the barrier – the silicon is. Indeed I think that if Haswell did have “normal temperatures” we’d still complain about the lack of overclocking headroom, however, the fact remains if they could do fluxless solder for Sandy Bridge why do we still not have it on Haswell Refresh after two generations of complaints with the sub-par TIM? Intel claims to have been listening to the enthusiast community and sure they have done this to some degree by improving the TIM used, but how many enthusiasts would have chosen a better TIM when fluxless solder is vastly more efficient than TIM could ever be?

Now let’s set aside the issue of temperatures and overclocking and move on to the rest of the CPU. I think the obvious win for the Core i7 4790K is the out-of-the-box performance. Effectively running at 4.4GHz all the time the Core i7 4790K is a blistering fast CPU – in fact some might even say “too fast” for most people. In certain applications the extra frequency doesn’t really scale, gaming is a good example of that,but on the whole it performs much better than the Core i7 4770K thanks to the 10+% speed boost across all cores, especially in productivity and rendering tasks. As we have seen the main rival CPU from AMD, the FX 8350 which costs half the price, can’t match the Core i7 4790K even when it is overclocked to 5GHz (which essentially means FX-9590 level performance). The main rival to the Core i7 4790K is Intel’s own Core i7 4770K or possibly Core i7 4820K. There is no doubt that the performance of the Core i7 4790K is unmatched, even by Intel themselves, because the Core i7 4960X/4930K CPUs still use the slower Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and considering most applications still only use two to four cores/threads the fact they have six cores makes little difference to most consumer applications and gaming. I am also pleased Intel are bringing the i7 4790K to market at the same MSRP as the i7 4770K, Intel could have easily brought it in at $20-30 more because they have no competition in this space.

I can forsee that some people might wonder why there has been no improvement in the integrated graphics with Haswell Refresh. My guess is that either the next-generation of Intel HD graphics for desktops are not ready (and probably won’t be until the next desktop platform Broadwell), or that Intel felt upgrading them was of little use because most people who buy these CPUs are enthusiasts who do not have a use for integrated graphics. I think either explanation is reasonable. We know Intel has better performing HD graphics it could have brought to Devil’s Canyon, like their GT3 HD 5200 graphics, but I can’t imagine the feature would get much use.

Pros

• Great out-of-the-box performance
• No price rise over the Core i7 4770K
• Unmatched performance, class-leading
• Backwards compatible with 8 series motherboards (Z87 etc, providing motherboard vendors issue BIOS updates)

Cons

• Temperatures are still mediocre – bring back fluxless solder!
• Overclocking headroom is very limited
• Integrated graphics have not improved

“Intel’s Core i7 4790K offers slightly improved temperatures and significantly improved out-of-the-box performance compared to its predecessor, the Core i7 4770K. Considering the i7 4790K hits the market at the same MSRP as the i7 4770K it really is a must-consider option for anyone interested in a high-end Intel Haswell system.”

Thank you to Intel for providing this review sample.