Hardware Intel Core i7-4770K CPU Review

It's doomed!!!

D O O M E D ! ! !

 

You referring to the work by the intel employees?

Also can you tell me what the bigger picture is, since I'm assuming I'm missing something.

 

The work of the reviewer was criticized leaving him to have to explain and apologise because he had been on holiday and because his colleagues had other things to review or are out of the country. Why should he have to apologise and why should the information he provided be picked at for something as small as grammar or "padding"?

The bigger picture is that the asumption of the review is a marginal performance increase which is correct but given that its not on a clock for clock basis the review needs to be looked at a little differently and thought about more on percentage terms of a clock for clock comparison. Only then is the review more accurate for a face value figure. Sometimes information like this cant be provided for reasons such as the haswell sample not clocking the same as previous generations etc so you work with what you have.

In an ideal world the whole review would have been donw with the same memory speeds, the same internal bus speeds and the same overall clock speeds. Its not an ideal world so the best of what could be achieved has been provided. These are as such not like for like comparisons and this is of no fault to bit-tech. Taking what they have provided though and working to a set figure using the percentages required to equal out the scores should a growth on the architecture that the review simply cannot show. Its that very point thats been missed when people say its not enough of a performance bump.

Clock for clock we have only ever had 10-12% improvements. The ability to overclock further is the only thing that set older gens apart, ie the move from Core 2 to i7. Unfortunately moving from a 3.6Ghz Q6600 to an i7 920 at 4,2Ghz is a thing of the past. We have hit a MHz wall so now the only improvements you are going to get is in for form of architecture based.

A 3.5Ghz Q6600 vs a 3.5GHz i7 920 was about a 15% boost. The fact it clocked much better gave the boost to around 30% which is why the world stopped and applauded. Your then looking at around 10-12% boost to sandybridge, the same for Ivybridge and the same again for Haswell. The only difference now is that the clock is the limiting factor. Improvements have always been about the same from an architecture perspective, the MHz perspective however has ran its course.

 

Yeah, well, whatever. Can people have a disagreement/debate without resorting to nationalist slurs or calling each other racist? That would be grand. Else I might have to swing the banhammer in the interest of international diplomacy and relations for a bit.

 

Any idea when you'll have the review of i5-4670k? Or is that in the hands of when intel give you the review chip? i7 is not really worth the extra cash for me in a strictly gaming/browsing rig

 

What fascinates me are the low voltage versions. 45W for a Quad core @ 2.5Ghz? That's insane!. A few years ago we didn't even have dual cores @ 45w.

That said, the improvements seem to range about 20% across the board. The gaming tests are a bit harder to quantify due to the high resolution of the test. Clock for clock it's about a 20% improvement from Sandybridge. Which combined with faster RAM and a generally lower power consumption and an upgrade from Nehalem is entirely justifiable. In fact even from Lynnfield it's very justifiable.

With this in mind though, the 20% increase isn't as massive because the numbers are gigantic in the first place. Is it worth the money? To me, from a Sandy Bridge owner's perspective. I can't justify it even though there's a clear 35-40% IPC increase. Why? Mainly because I don't see the limitations yet. And by the time I do upgrade, I'll be changing out a rather large amount of things aside from what I have.

It's actually not disappointing given the consistency with which intel has released these things. At the steady rate of 15-30% IPC increase a year they've managed to eclipse AMD entirely. And yes, resource differences in RnD aside, it's still impressive given that they make no excuses. They just chug along. You'd think they'd run into a wall. But no.

Basically, if you haven't grabbed an LGA1155 chipset and processor. The 4670k is worth the pennies you'll pay. Couple it with some rather cheap Samsung DDR3 1333 (can be clocked to 2133) RAM. And you'll have a monster of a machine.

 

What everyone needs to remember is, although there are K class CPU's that can OC, we are not the target for CPU sales any more, so we'll never see dramatic performance upgrades again. No surprise really.

 

Hasfail. Hasbeen. Hasnotwell.

I find it utterly hilarious that Haswell is Intel's Bulldozer yet no one wants to admit it because they've been rimming Intel for so long that they daren't call a spade a spade.

I've spent all day reading reviews and I find it almost impossible to believe that Haswell hasn't been slated for what it is. A completely pointless waste of time that commands a new motherboard and possibly a new power supply.

Unbelievable.

 

Did someone say ban hammer?

 

@andrew8200m

As a 17 year old, although this is no way your fault, I would guess that you have very little appreciation for what hard work really is as you are either still at school or you have been working in a low end job for a couple of years.

Believe me that isn't hard work, I have 3 degrees (two of which I got whilst working full time at the same time, have learnt 3 languages and started my own business 2 years ago in a foreign country that is now earning me close to £100k a year (I currently have to work from 7.30am - 10.30pm Mon-Fri and 8am to 4pm Sat to make sure everything is done) and I have 2 very young children to look after. When you have done anything close to this by the time you are my age (30) then you can come down off your high horse and talk about hard work.

The guys who write the reviews are probably on deadlines and have a s**t ton of other stuff to do. Unfortunately this time things seem to have piled up and quality may have suffered a little. Yes this may warrant comment but there are ways to do this.

You talk about lack of intelligence and the degradation of the UK, well you are a perfect advert for that with your rude and aggressive manner and your way of talking in absolutes like they are facts, This is a route only taken by fools.

Also, being a white male i'm sure you understand, on a personally experienced level, all about discrimination faced by many people in the UK.

Don't get me wrong, lazy people do exist and yes most people could work harder but to ignore all associated factors and claim most people are lazy and stupid is a bit ironic in it's laziness and stupidity of thought, not to mention arrogant. It sounds like rhetoric repeated straight from the mainstream tabloids.

Now, I suggest that you put down The Sun or The Daily Mail or whatever you use to get your information, learn some manners and social etiquette and be thankful that Mummy and Daddy and your accident of birth in a G10 country have handed you a reletively easy life that you seem to think entitles you to judge others in such a generic and broad fashion.

Edit: Because I just saw your sig

Unless of course you one of the best paid , most intelligent, hardworking 17 year olds around to afford all that stuff in your sig because I assume that with your attitude you don't still live with your mum and dad so you also have to pay rent/mortage (and if you do rent I assume you are intelligent enough to be saving money for a place to live and not wasting it on things like incremental PC upgrades) and bills, transport costs etc because how else would you be in a position to judge others and their work like you do?

Sorry everyone for this rant but I'm sick of seeing this attitude from self-entitled young people because it is usually very hypocrital.

 

Hello AlphaAngel

I would like to thank you for that post as you understand clearly most points that have been made even if my point of the over exaggeration of how others are has been missed.


17 generations traced, Not 17 years of age. Ive defended the reviews whilst others have picked. I understand fully everything you have said and agree with most of it but to direct that at myself when I was directing it at others and not myself leaves me a little bemused but given you have missed that point I will let it lay.

The attitude displayed was my over exaggeration of those adopted in plain site here. I'm personally sick to death of assumption and instantaneous judgement. Its those two traits that are displayed when the brain doesn't engage on full tap and the end result is as displayed by many and can be explained by the following literal sentence - "well that looks rubbish because I don't understand what has been put in front of me and I'm a little too lazy to sit and work it out so instead I am going to take pick at the hard work of this reviewer for padding a little"

The internet unfortunately is segregated. You have industry's prone to the lazy and those that aren't. For example, most sites explaining technology have the fan boys and other delinquents who for what ever reason believe that A is better than B just because they have it and the other product may have caused problems queue AMD/Nvidia red vs Green. This subjective approach is primitive at best and only the objective amongst us are left shaking our heads in disbelief. The same industry also has those with the inability to interpret data correctly leading to the inevitable "well that's rubbish" and that's where we are left here. Gaming industry and anything that involves internet warriors follow the above trends in some variation or another.

If you look at Car forums dedicated to a certain brand and not a mixture of universal brands then you end up with a bunch of very polite and helpful people where criticism is left at home on the majority of occasions.

What I have done is displayed perfectly what I have to deal with on a daily basis and over exaggerated it on an elevated level.

It well and truly sucks doesn't it!

Bringing back to the edit, I work very hard to pay for everything that I should want or require in my life and provide to the best of my ability for my wife to be. The line of work that I partake in I however shall not disclose but lets just say like the reviewer, comments made by people who don't read between the lines and interpret in a lazy fashion make the hard work far less enjoyable than it should be. Just because the achievement is not theirs should they have the right to scrutiny when reality leads a probability that they themselves could do no better.

 

1 I'd love it if all the off-topic posts were purged or moved into a separate thread *said ina Kevin Keegan trembling voice*

2 I'm both disappointed and happy with Haswell. Happy because it looks like my i7 920 will carry me through at least one more year so money saved. Disappointed because it means we are not really pushing software and hardware hard enough. It just seems that we've reached a point where professional uses are the only way to push high end CPU's. Consumers haven't needed that power for a long time now and gamers very rarely get a title which benefits from the CPU power.

3 Although Haswell is somewhat disappointing as a desktop part, it will be interesting to see what it does in ULV incarnations for laptops. I know this is an enthusiast site and it probably hurts many people here, but Intel is selling more laptop than desktop chips now and it shows in their emphasis.

4 Even if I'm not amazed by the jump in performance, if I was building a new rig today, I'd get one of these CPU's without a doubt.

 

This is what makes me interested in the new architecture. I'm interested to see what NAS boxes Synology might make out of these new chips.

A low powered chip capable of transcoding would be a perfect upgrade for me.

 

Okay, so, the potential for the 1150 platform comes next year with the change to the 14nm process and hopefully a bump in the number of cores to six, or even eight, to more closely match the new games consoles.

That should get us moving in terms of overall CPU die performance, again, as Intel have stalled on this front since they split off increased core counts away from the mainstream platform; leaving the mainstream in quad core land for the last 2.5-5 years depending if you ignore Westmere based upon cost or not.

I'm hoping for Global Foundries, and so AMD, to get 20nm out of the door so that there is a more competitive product landscape in the mainstream segment.

 

You know ****'s getting serious when Nexxo rolls up with his trademark red pen.

This comments thread disgusts me and it is exactly the sort of thing that would put someone off from registering here

Seriously can't we go back to the good old days of discussion? M0ngy only has an account here to sporadically criticise the editorial team so I'd advise everyone to put him on your ignore list without delay.

 

In that respect you can only hope that the console markets were holding the PC game market back a bit and that with new consoles on the horizon it might start to be more of a requirement to make the large steps in processing power.

Don't hold your breath on that though

 

What was that music back in the 80's from Ban Hammer... Crocket's theme or something?

I'm just wondering why it is intel have taken to using thermal paste on all their CPUs? I can only surmise perhaps because they think 22nm with great power-saving = chance to save money and use thermal paste instead of solder?

That doesn't make any sense when we're talking about a K processor though does it?

Someone here mentioned it was easy to slice through the black glue and remove the metal cover. That actually sounds quite appealing.

 

Thats more because quad core is the sweet spot more than anything...

 

This post sums me up too. I got myself excited at the prospect of doing a full upgrade this year. But looking at the charts I see no reason to fork out however many hundreds of pounds on new CPU and mobo from my i5-2500K. I can't remember when I bought my i5 but it feels like such a long time ......