Core i7 4790K Processor 5.0 GHz Review - A Silicon Lottery - The 4790K Silicon lottery - 1st Try

For our testing purposes we used the all new ASUS SaberTooth Mark S Limited Edition (review here). Cooling wise things remain a little tough, I means the Haswell generation processors are a bit of a bitch to cool once you increase voltages. We use the Corsair H110 – a AIO kit that is commonly used yet offers very decent performance.

We enabled our XMP profile at 2133 MHz for the memory, and applied the settings as aforementioned in our BIOS. Instantly we booted into windows, and to see 5 GHz for the first time, yeah that does bring a smile upon your face.

The initial tests show complete stability, though temps are high, really high. To adapt to that in the next phase we'll try and see if we can get voltages down a tiny notch so that we can better deal with the produced heat. I mean hey, this is only a Corsair H110 AIO cooler kit we are using. 

The first try easily passed a 1m Wprime run. After a little more tweaking we noticed a couple of things:

1. We purchased a 5.0 GHz processor and indeed it is 100% stable at 5 GHz, 5.1 GHz would boot as well, but did not remain stable no matter what we tried voltages wise.
2. CPU Core Voltage - You will have a bit of playroom voltages wise. At 5 GHz we can still boot at 1.30 Volts but stability became an issue. We needed to settle at 1.35 Volts for complete stability. That is a notch lower then we purchased, which is great.
3. CPU VCCIN (Processor input voltage ) – here you will find a notch more bandwidth to play with. We found that the recommended 1.97 V was not needed. Lowering VCCIN to 1.90 Volts resulted into a perfectly fine input voltage while consuming less power and producing less heat.

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