Intel Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅10-06-14
Temperatures and Overclocking


It’s widely accepted that Intel’s Core i7-4770K can get rather hot, especially when the chip is fully loaded and an overclock is applied. The inauguration of Devil’s Canyon claims to combat this very issue and below verifies this notion.

Although at stock temperatures the 4790K results in higher temperatures in the graph, it’s imperative to note that the base clock on this chip is 4GHz – 500MHz faster than the 4770K - and will Boost to 4.4GHz. This increase in frequency also alters the voltage too but as you can clearly see, the difference in temperature is nominal. Place the 4770K at 4.4-4.6GHz and you will almost certainly have the chip sitting in the low-mid 80s on identical cooling.



Overclocking

Since the introduction of Z87 back in 2013, there has been a return to BCLK overclocking. This type of functionality ensures flexibility for Overclockers compared to previous generations where the BCLK was locked to 100MHz and only the ratio could be adjusted. As many of you will know, when the Haswell CPUs hit the scene, reports revealed high temperatures with even small increases in voltage (which is required for attaining substantial overclocks) This meant there was little headroom for overclocking but the new 4790K hope to change this. Intel has replaced the TIM and so we expect good things from this new chip. For reference, our 4770K hit a brick wall at 4.6GHz.


Intel Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K max. overclock & temps


After many hours of adjustments and tweaking, the best overclock we could reach with 4790K was 4.8GHz. No amount of core voltage or other modifications would allow the chip to move up to 4.9/5GHz). Even increasing the core voltage to 1.45v or dropping the ratio down and increasing the BCLK didn’t allow us to budge over the 4.8GHz mark.

Although we did need 1.38v to achieve 4.8GHz you will notice the temperatures are lower than an equivalent 4770K at such frequency and/or voltage. This is testament to the improved TIM, and could indicate that our Engineering Sample is limited by other than heat output. Overclockers experienced with the Haswell platform may find that there are yet more gains to be had, especially under water or more exotic cooling methods.


Intel Core i7-4770K max. overclock & temps



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