Intel Core i7-4790K Devil’s Canyon Processor Review

3DMark 2013

Futuremark 3DMark has three primary benchmark tests that you can run and which test you should be running depends on the system that you are benchmarking on.

• Ice Storm – For mobile devices and entry-level PCs
• Cloud Gate – For notebooks and home PCs
• Fire Strike Extreme – For extreme gaming PCs (extreme mode for those with multiple GPUs)

Since all of the benchmarks can be run on desktop PCs, we will run each of them on our Intel and AMD processors to see how they stack up.

Intel Core i7-3770K w/ Intel HD Graphics 4000:

Intel Core i7-4770K CPU w/ Intel HD Graphics 4600:

Intel Core i7-4790K CPU w/ Intel HD Graphics 4600:

Let’s take a closer look at 3DMark Cloud Gate as that is a best representative of the integrated graphics performance on these processors:

Benchmark Results: The Intel Core i7-4790K scored 8818 points in Fire Strike, which is 29% faster than the Intel Core i7-3770K score of 6796 and 3% faster than the Intel Core i7-4770K processors score of 8567. If you take a closer look at the individual game tests from that benchmark you can see that the Core i7-4790K and Core i7-4770K each won a Graphics Test scene and are no more than half a FPS apart. This makes perfect sense as they share the same graphics core. If you look at the Physics test you’ll see 11.5% difference between the Core i7-4770K and the Core i7-4790K due to the much higher clock speeds on the 4790K four x86 cores. The ‘old’ Intel Core i7-3770K ‘Ivy Bridge’ processor is still hanging in there though and was found to be 16% slower in the physics test and 38% slower in Graphics Test 1.