Intel Core i7-4790K Review

Looking to upgrade my current CPU (I7-4790k) to either 3600x or 3700x. The 3600x right now is £200 ($251) or I can get the 3700x for £252 ($316) just wondering if the extra £52 ($65) is worth it to get the 3700x over the 3600x. The GPU I'll be pairing it with is the 1070. Thanks!

Get 3600 non X. It's basically the same and extra price for 3600x is not worth it for 2% performance difference if both are ran stock. If you OC then both OC exactly the same. Money you don't spend on 3700x you can use towards upgrading your GPU. Much better performance gain if you go this route. 3700x has just extra 2 cores.

Can you still OC to 3600x performance with the 3600 stock cooler ?

Watch the Digital Foundry 'Future proofing you PC for next Gen gaming'. They talk through both of those ultimately saying 3600 is good for 3 years with 3700X possibly having a longer life span.

Are they close in gaming? At the moment, yes, very. But two extra cores are still two extra cores. Just seems like a much better long term investment. 3700X will likely have a much better resale value when you decide to upgrade.

Also, do you really want to risk feeling the pain of regret due to being behind consoles because you went for a six core when you could have gone with the 3700X for a peanuts $65 premium?

In long run he can put saved money now for swap to 4000 series. I bought 3700X only cause I wanted to, but 3600 is way better price/performance balanced. There is no point gettin basically the same performance for more money only for future, cause in future he would have better option to swap and he will save money now. That's my opinion.

If only gaming, buy 3600 without X. You will have more money on something else.

If you are coming from an i7 4790k:

In my opinion it's worth spending the extra money.

Hey, pretty much the same dilemma I had, just with a non-k 4790.

I went for the 3700x in the end. But I frequently move my pc's between my own use and home server tasks (that's where the 4790 is moving to), and for that I can take advantage of the extra cores to handle additional VM's. You have to think on what you are going to do with it, if your use case is "gaming and nothing but gaming", I'd save my money and pick the 3600 instead. Otherwise I say go for the extra cores.

It would literally just be for pure gaming at 1080p at 144hz maybe some streaming here and there

Something to consider is that the new consoles coming out will both have 8 core cpus. So most games will be made to be played with an 8-core cpu for the foreseeable future. Will it make a difference to have only 6 cores? I have no idea. Maybe at some point? Probably not. But possibly?

That is totally not true. The ps3 also used an 8 core cpu and that was 10 years ago. For gaming on a pc you still only need a quad core processor. The 3700x will net you the best performance but it's only going to be a 5-10% improvement over a 3600 non x. So it the extra 100$ is worth 5-10 % to you go for it. But I would rather get a better graphics card or better memory.

What resolution are you going to be using.

That's another reason why I'm tied between them, although current gen consoles too have 8 cores but yet we don't really see game go to use 8 cores fully still.

Can anyone give me some tips when it comes to overclocking? I have an i7 4790k which is cooled by coolermaster 240l. My motherboard is GA-H81M-HD3. I dont even know if this mobo is sufficient for a stable overclock but any advice would be helpful. I tried this on myself but one of the cores was 20 degrees higher than all others under load. This worried me a bit as core 0 is usually 5 - 10 degrees warmer than the rest but the difference isnt usually that large! Thanks in advance

You can only overclock the CPU with a Z motherboard

I was considering delid in order to try and sort out the temp difference with that one core. But is it worth it or would I be better off buying a new cpu

My gtx 980 died recently, and I've been forced to use integrated graphics. I can only play 1 game now with 60+ FPS(Starcraft 2, but it sometimes drops to 1fps, I'm guess when it runs out of dedicated memory), and even in that game with the lowest possible settings it shows an error message warning me that

"This warning displays if you don't have enough available memory on your system to use your current settings. This includes physical memory, video memory, and virtual memory. You can continue to run the game at higher settings, but this may lead to performance issues and instability.

If your graphics card doesn’t have enough video RAM, or you’re using integrated graphics, you should reduce the texture quality."

I cannot figure out how to in bios overclock or overvolt the HD 4600(Asus Z97-AR motherboard). I looked up guides and youtube videos on how to dedicate more RAM(I think) as VRAM for the integrated graphics, but it did not work. And, I've heard that you shouldn't use Intel Xtreme Tuning to do it(and should use bios).

Looking for help on identifying in Bios what to change. All that I've seen that seems relevant is "GPU Cache Multiple", and it seems editing it with XMP on is impossible, as it's greyed out unless I turn XMP off. And the number there doesn't seem to represent frequency, as it's way too high by default to be a multiple of the frequency of the HD 4600.

If anyone can help me OC and Over Volt my integrated graphics( and dedicate more memory to it), it'd be awesome. I plan to get a new dedicated GPU in the coming weeks when I see a good deal, but this will at least help me play one game in the meantime.

Hey Guys,

A few days ago I turned on the PC and immediately it crashed. Blue screen-->Bios reset to default. I'm assuming it was an overclocking problem so I restored my pre-crash BIOS profile and synced all cores one notch lower. I also went to all modified voltages and etc and turned those down a tad bit as well. If you've read this far you've probably realized I have no idea what I'm doing . I'm purely going off youtube videos with system specs similar to mine. Anyways, any help would be awesome.

My specs:

ASUS Z87-PRO

I7 4790K 4.3 (Originally 4.4)

GTX 980 TI

DDR3-1600 4X4 16GB

CX 600

Cooler Master Hyper 212

Any input would be amazing. The tutorial I was following for my initial BIOS mod is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-oAf2tVDcg

Thanks!

What's your input voltage/vcore, and also temps under full prime95 small FFT non avx load? If you have stability issues, you can try higher input voltage. My old 4690k needed about 0.7v higher input voltage than vcore for the best stability FYI. And also don't use high LLC for input voltage. Typically the low-mid setting is optimal (but it's difficult to tell).

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/41234-intel-haswell-4670k-4770k-overclocking-guide/ The guide I recommend, scroll past the videos for a quicker guide.

The thing that was making my 4790k unstable when I overclocked it was leaving my uncore ratio on auto. It will try to match it to your CPU's ratio in that case, causing instability. Set uncore to somthing like 39x or 41x and leave it there.

This is the guide that I followed:

https://www.overclock.net/forum/5-intel-cpus/1411077-haswell-overclocking-guide-statistics.html

Got my 4790k to 4.7GHz using this.