Devil's Canyon: Intel Core i7-4790K OC'ing and Review
Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and ensured the memory speed was set to DDR3-1600 or DDR3-1333 on the Intel systems and DDR3-1866 on the AMD systems (each platform's maximum, officially supported speeds).
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The Core i7-4790K in Gigabyte's Z97X SOC Force Motherboard
The solid state drives in the test systems were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.
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| System 1: Intel Core i7-4790K (4GHz - Quad-Core) Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force (Z97 Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1600MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS |
System 2: Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5GHz - Quad-Core) MSI Z87-GD65 (Z87 Express Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1600MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS |
System 3: Intel Core i7-3770K (3.5GHz - Quad-Core) Intel Core i7-2700K (3.5GHz - Quad-Core) MSI Z77A-GD65 (Z77 Express Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1600MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS |
System 4: Intel Core i7-3690X (3.33GHz - Hex-Core) Intel Core i7-3820 (3.6GHz - Quad-Core) Asus P9X79 Deluxe (X79 Express Chipset) 4x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1600MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS |
System 5: AMD FX 8150 (3.6GHz Eight-Core) AMD FX 8350 (4GHz Eight-Core) Asus CrossHair V Formula (AMD 990FX Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1866MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2013, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite with Intel's new Core i7-4790K processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 4GHz (4.4GHz Turbo) with 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force motherboard.
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Processor Arithmetic
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Processor Multi-Media
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Memory Bandwidth;)
Cache and Memory Bandwidth
The Core i7-4790K put up the best scores on any quad-core Intel processors released to day in the various CPU-centric SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks we ran. In the memory bandwidth test, however, the Core i7-4790K put up similar numbers (about 21GB/s) to other Haswell-based processors, when paired to DDR3-1600MHz running in dual-channel mode.
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