Devil's Canyon: Core i5 4690K and Core i7 4790K review

[Administrator]

Nehalem. Sandy Bridge. Ivy Bridge. Haswell. Year after year, Intel has produced ever more capable, more efficient CPU architectures with relentless pace. The strategy's known as the "tick-tock" model. A new architecture is released with a tock, before it's shrunk down the following year onto an even smaller fabrication process - the tick - making it even more power-efficient, before the cycle begins again. Last year's Haswell, manifesting in the top-end Core i7 4770K, was a tock. This year we were expecting to see the 14nm tick, codenamed Broadwell. The only problem is, it's not ready.
Shrinking transistors isn't as easy as it used to be - not even for the mighty Intel - so to fill the void left by Broadwell's no-show, we have the imaginatively titled Haswell Refresh. These CPUs are available right now and while remaining as powerful and as great value as ever, the refresh simply amounts to Intel bumping up clock speeds across the board by 100MHz and selling the new chips at the same price as the older ones they replace. However, Devil's Canyon - the new enthusiast products - are different. The chips are the same but the surrounding packaging is redesigned with overclocking in mind, addressing an area of the market Intel struggled to satisfy with last year's offerings.
Devil's Canyon takes the form of new, unlocked K-series Core i5 and i7 processors, accompanied by the release of an unlocked £50/$75 dual-core Pentium Anniversary Edition we'll be looking at soon. On the face of it, the Core i5 4690K doesn't look like much to write home about - it's got the requisite 100MHz clock-speed increase over last year's model, moving up to 3.5GHz base and 3.9GHz with Turbo Boost active. However, the new i7 4970K is intriguing: stock speed moves from 3.5GHz to a stunning 4.0GHz, while turbo hits an even more impressive 4.4GHz. Out of the box, this is the fastest quad-core CPU Intel has ever shipped and it's quite a technical achievement, bearing in mind that some of last year's i7 4770Ks failed to overclock to this level.
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