Intel Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Has Landed
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 to DDR3-1600, or DDR3-1333 on the Intel systems and DDR3-1866 on the AMD systems (their maximum, officially supported speeds).
;)
G.SKILL Trident X Haswell-Ready 8GB Memory Kit
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.
 |
|
| System 1: Intel Core i7-4770K (3.5GHz - Quad-Core) MS Z87-GD65 Intel DZ87KLT-75K Asus Z87-Deluxe Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H (Z87 Express Chipset) 2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1600MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS Windows 7 x64 |
System 2: 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 Windows 7 x64 |
System 3: Cntel 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 Windows 7 x64 |
System 4: 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 Windows 7 x64 |
System 5: Intel Core i7-990X (3.43GHz Hex-Core) Gigabyte EX58-UD4 (X58 Express Chipset) 3x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866 (@ 1333MHz) GeForce GTX 280 On-Board Ethernet On-board Audio OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS Windows 7 x64 |
 |
|
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 2013 suite with Intel's new Core i7-4770K 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 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) with 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the Intel DZ87KLT-75K motherboard.
;)
Processor Arithmetic
;)
Processor Multi-Media
;)
Memory Bandwidth;)
Cache and Memory Bandwidth
With the SANDRA 2013 benchmark modules we used, the Core i7-4770K performed much like a Core i7-3770K in the processor arithmetic test, but in the multi-media test, the newer Haswell-based chip had a marked advantage. According to SANDRA, the Core i7-4770K offered up about 20.55GB/s of memory bandwidth when paired to DDR3-1600MHz RAM and in the cache and memory test, the processor's performance once again look much like the Core i7-3770K.
;){kind=link}