Introduction

Intel Core i7-4790K Tested - Devils Canyon... Is It Demonic?

One of the most talked of processors this year has to be the product we are reviewing today. The Core i7-4790K. Dubbed and known as a Devils Canyon the new K model processor it finally has arrived in the highlands of that mystic land called Groningen in the Netherlands. Okay, lame puns aside, Intel last week announced a couple of K model processors. The Core i7-4790K will replace the 4770K as flagship processor. By itself that normally means a 100 MHz speed-bump, but know that for the 4790K things really are quite a bit different. 

One of the bigger complaints over the past two years has been that Intel changed the thermal design of their processors, they are a lot harder to cool down. We'll talk more in-depth about it on the next pages, but that has been improved. Next to that if we look at the 4790K specifically, we notice a very healthy bump in performance, this processor has a base-clock of 4 GHz, and all its four cores are allowed to turbo towards a whopping 4400 MHz if they meet the thermal and power thresholds set by Intel. And yeah that is significant.

So in theory we have a processor that not only is clocked significantly faster, it should overclock a bit better as well. Join us as we look at the performance of this CPU in a wide variety of benchmark, will it be noticeably faster then say a Core i7-4770K? Well today we will seek & find an answer to that. As you guys know Z97 and the Intel refresh of their Haswell processors has been anything from a well-kept secret, up-to the tiniest little details have spread on the web. Now this month a number of things are going to happen. You'll notice the recently announced Haswell refresh based processors available in stores as well, mostly all of them merely have a small 100/200 MHz clock frequency increment for a tiny boost in performance. However you'll have noticed an extensive wave of H97/Z97 motherboard releases as the manufacturers are releasing some really cool stuff alright.

The upcoming K model processors have been developed under code-name Devil's Canyon will find its way to the stores in two weeks time, end of June. They have an improved heat-spreader and thermal insulation material in that CPU package that is going to cool these processors much better once you pump extra volts in them. 

Most of the reader-base of Guru3D are the hardcore gamers that build their own PCs, so today a review on the flagship Haswell architecture based Core i7-4790K Devils Canyon processor. Finally, the K model, meaning chances of overclocking should be good. We'll first take you through the architecture, the new features and then we'll start up the performance tests. Have a peek at what will be tested, let's head on-wards to the next page.

Intel Core i7-4790K - Devils Canyon processor. This is an ES version, short for Engineering sample