The Intel Haswell Refresh Review: Core i7-4790, i5-4690 and i3-4360 Tested
by Ian Cutress on May 11, 2014 3:01 AM ESTConclusions
When a company builds a product that evolves and adapts every generation, unless they are under strong competition on all fronts, the best and brightest will not be released on day one. The company can afford to be more casual in how it approaches the product stack. This allows for updates to be produced during downtime that are just a slightly more aggressive policy revision. In the land of processors, this means more stringent bins or tighter pricing methods. The Haswell Refresh is essentially this – Intel has a long time between major updates (ticks or tocks) and can launch a number of processors in the interim which are more competitive for price and/or performance until the next major update appears.
As expected, the Core i7-4790 CPU that we had beats the i7-4770K in each of the CPU benchmarks by a consistent margin due to the CPU frequency increase. In a similar vein, the IGP of the i7-4790 trails that of the i7-4770K due to the 50 MHz deficit on the side of the i7-4790. There are no surprises here, it has all gone by the book.
While our other CPU matchups were not as ideal as the i7, the i5 and i3 both show their respective positions in the table. The use of the i7-4765T as a low frequency, quad core CPU with HyperThreading also puts in an element of analysis, whereby removing the HyperThreading for the i5-4690 actually puts it ahead on several of the single threaded / high-register requirement benchmarks.
In discrete GPU testing, the CPUs all perform similarly in single GPU conditions. This showcases that high-end CPUs, even for modern games are not needed when it comes to discrete gaming capabilities. This seems especially true for Tomb Raider which comes across as completely CPU agnostic, choosing to offload as much of the work onto the GPU as possible.
In dual GPU conditions, we get more of a landscape of where the Haswell Refresh CPUs stand. The i3-4360, in the same PCIe arrangement as the i5 and i7 CPUs, fails to scale as well as the CPUs with more cores. This equates to about 10% in Sleeping Dogs/Battlefield 4 using the GTX 770s in SLI, or 30% in the same benchmarks using HD 7970s in CrossFire. For users enjoying the higher refresh rate monitors, such as 120 Hz or 144 Hz, this can make a significant difference. The inclusion of HyperThreading with the i7-4790 did not give any advantage in gaming compared to the i5-4690, except in the CPU benchmarks where each thread had minimal register requirements (PovRay, 3DPM).
On the IGP side all of our new CPUs were using the HD4600 solution making comparison straightforward. The i7 seems to have the clear advantage here, with up to 10% performance increase against the i3. The difference between the i7 and i5 however was minimal, but exaggerated in some of the synthetic tests such as 3DMark Cloud Gate which ends up more CPU bound.
For a lot of users interested in overclocking CPUs or who have already moved to Haswell, this refresh will seem almost pointless. It is a chance for Intel to combine the release of a new chipset with a series of CPUs so system integrators and retailers can start selling bundles. For the enthusiasts especially, the new overclocking-focused Devil’s Canyon and Pentium-K processors supposedly coming soon are being awaited with bated breath.
For new users looking to go Intel however, the Haswell Refresh is the new platform to get. It edges out the older CPUs either in terms of performance or price, but not in a massive excitement sort of way. Intel has played it safe, as you would expect when you have a performance advantage.
The last question to consider is if this is the right time to purchase: is there something new around the corner? For the enthusiast, the next generation of enthusiast CPUs (Haswell-E and X99) are due out in the second half of this year, however one would expect the entry point for this platform is around the $500 mark (CPU + motherboard + DRAM). For more mainstream uses, Intel has teased Broadwell news in the form of an unlocked Iris Pro CPU, however that seems to be due more towards the end of 2014/2015 if the Broadwell NUC roadmap is anything to go by. That would mean anyone buying a Haswell Refresh platform today, with a new CPU, would have until the end of the year before it is no longer the latest technology in the more casual desktop market. However, Broadwell processors are assumed to be LGA1150, the same as Haswell, meaning an upgrade should be as simple as replacing the CPU.
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name99 - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
"For longer cadences it makes sense to launch an improved product in the middle of that cadence taking advantage of minor production improvements."Nice save, Ian, but let's be honest here. This product is being launched for one, and only one reason --- Broadwell is delayed, and this is the best Intel can do to fill the gap and quieten the anger from customers (like Apple) who've had to delay all their plans because of the Broadwell slip.
GuardianAngel470 - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
On page two: "At this point in time it is clear that the i7-4670K and i7-4770K models do not have refresh counterparts..."That first i7 seems to be an i5 in disguise. You may want to beef up your internal security, it seems you have been discretely infiltrated.
Ian Cutress - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
Nice catch :) Fixed!meacupla - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
I only care about that 20th anniversary edition Pentiumhojnikb - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
Yep, me too :)Ramon Zarat - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
LMAO... My ASRock Z68 Extreme4 GEN3 from 2011, 4 generations behind this Z97, offers me 98%+ of the functionality and speed!Ok, I have a moded BIOS to get my 2 X SSD to run in RAID0 (man, I hate artificial market segmentation) and get well over 900MB/s sequential read, but beside that, NOTHING revolutionary from Intel Z97 to make wish to upgrade from what I already have!
Already got plenty of USB3 ports with 4 total (only a handful of devices can actually use full USB3 speed anyway), the PCIe lanes from the GPU are already GEN3 thanks to ASRock GEN3 series, I have a much more flexible I/O hub/switch (PLX PEX8608) for the 8 X PCIe 2.0 lanes from the south bridge, so EVERYTHING is concurrently *LIVE* (gigabit Ethernet, USB3, *ALL* PCIe lanes etc...), so need to choose a limited setup and call it "flexible" LOL...
2 X SATA 6Gb/s for my 2 SSDs is enough, as the other 4 SATA 3Gb/s are also more than enough for mechanical hard drives. I don't see HDD busting the 3Gb/s barrier anytime soon. I even have a Marvell SATA controller on top for either e-SATA or 2 X internal optical drives. Also, I'm already booting from SSD, so the PCIe SSD booting mean nothing to me. From cold start to login screen in less than 25 seconds and I always put the computer to sleep anyway, so boot time is actually less than 3 second 99% of the time so that EUFI fast boot also means nothing to me.
With a 4.7Ghz quad core CPU and 16GB of 1600Mhz CL8 RAM, I'll keep this rig for a long, long LONG time! The only upgrade I see in 4-5 years is maybe 2 larger SSDs and a maybe a new DX12 video card when they become cheap AND plenty of games requires DX12. We have been GPU limited for a long time now and I don't see that changing 5 years from now where my current CPU will still be more than enough to push a DX12 GPU @ 1080p (I won't switch to 4K resolution before my next PC in 7-10 years from now).
The desktop might not be dead, but it surely reached a point where it's so powerful, it's good enough for so many things you do, you actually don't need to upgrade every 36 months anymore.
For example, MP3 are now converted practicality instantaneously and HD content only take a few minutes. You can do HUGE spreadsheets calculation is mere seconds, Photoshop effects as well etc... One of the only thing still too CPU intensive is Hollywood grade 3D rendering and for that, we now use rendering farms with GPGPU, local or in the cloud, tens of thousand of time faster than any desktop.
I have the feeling my next PC will not be a silicon based technology!
wetwareinterface - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
you have 2x ssd's in raid 0 claiming 900MB/s and your boot time tot login screen is under 25 seconds?i have a single older samsung 240 non pro/evo 250 GB drive and my boot time to desktop with all drivers loaded and internet connected is, after manually logging in btw, around 15 seconds.
maybe you shouldn't dismiss an upgrade too quickly
wetwareinterface - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
that's a cold boot time alsoRamon Zarat - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
Well, that's 1 big difference right there; you don't boot in RAID mode, therefore you don't have the ~5 seconds RAID BIOS screen to go through as I do! Single SSD drives are practically always faster to boot compared to RAID0 SSD for that reason alone, but:I have a lot of stuff installed on an old (3+ years) Win 7 install. That makes the boot take more time. Also, the boot process involve a lot of small files, making the RAID0 less efficient (files smaller than the strip size are loaded from 1 drive instead of 2) and finally, my older Crucial M4 single drive performance is slower than your more recent Samsung that I guess is the 840 (AFAIK, there is no such thing as the Samsung 240 SSD), especially for writing. You don't mention it, but Windows 8 usually boot faster than the 7 that I use. My guess is you have a fresh Windows 8.1 install. All this explain the other ~5 seconds from my 25 to your 15.
One thing I can assure you, I'm launching games and app with larger sequential files size a lot faster than your single Samsung drive, especially because I also use a 5GB RAM drive for all my system tmp and temp folder (incredible speed boost for Photoshop Scratch disk for example). CrytalDiskMark doesn't lie.
I guess my point is, 90% of my SSD access patterns are medium/large size reads, not writes (install game/app once, play/use hundreds of times) and I re-boot my PC once every 2-3 weeks or so to "refresh" the system from a clean cold boot and it take only 25 sec. I sneeze 2-3 times in a row and I miss the boot process entirely! This is nowhere near the "it's so time consuming, I MUST upgrade" scenario. Every other time I boot, which is 95% of the time in fact, it's 3 seconds from sleep... So no, I really don't *NEED* to upgrade.
I once endured stuff like 5-10 *MINUTES* boot time with Windows 95-98, so I'll go along with 25 seconds just fine! I used to power up my PC in the morning, then getting my coffee and 2 toasts, and when I done eating my breakfast, the PC just made it to the login screen! :) Ahhhhh, the good old days of running Windows 95 from an AMD 486DX/4-120 and a 5400RPM HDD!
Just like I've said, I won't need to upgrade for a long, long time!
Flunk - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
That's your problem right there, if you're running Windows 7 that's going to kill your boot time right there. Even my laptop that only has a Sandforce mSATA drive boots in 7 seconds using Windows 8.