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 $500 mark (CPU + motherboard + DRAM). For more mainstream uses, Intel has teased Broadwell news in the form of an unlocked Iris Pro CPU, however that seems to be due more towards the end of 2014/2015 if the Broadwell NUC roadmap is anything to go by. That would mean anyone buying a Haswell Refresh platform today, with a new CPU, would have until the end of the year before it is no longer the latest technology in the more casual desktop market. However, Broadwell processors are assumed to be LGA1150, the same as Haswell, meaning an upgrade should be as simple as replacing the CPU.
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etamin - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
I feel that a whole lot of unnecessary effort was put into the benchmarks. But we appreciate the effort of course.I'm looking forward to SATA Express. Are there any compatible consumer level M.2 SSDs currently available?
weilin - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
Yup, look for the models below in M.2 interfaceIntel: 530
Crucial: M500, M550
Misc: MyDigitalSSD, Samsung (only second hand/OEM stuff, no retail presence)
jjj - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
But there is competition, more than they ever had. You got tablets and phones killing PC sales and Intel is just sabotaging the only PC segment able to create any hype around PC. There is nobody else that really gives a damn about their products but hey they would rather have 60% margins instead of 58% even if they lose us too.Instead of giving us a 300$ 8 cores chip with no GPU, they are giving away free tablet Atom because that will help.....
juhatus - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
I totally agree, Intel should really push PC again, not replace schim's with better ones.bji - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link
Intel cannot generate sufficient returns on its R & D dollars anymore. Nobody in the consumer market cares that much about faster Intel chips except CPU enthusiasts, and it's not a market that can even come close to supplying enough money to fund the R & D necessary to significantly advance x86 performance.You can blame AMD for not supplying enough competition, but a bigger part of the equation is that faster Intel chips don't sell "enough more" than current generation ones to justify spending huge amounts of R & D money on them.
You can look at this as a sad fact, but I actually like it. I can by a laptop now for cheap that is so overly spec'd for my needs that I essentially never need to upgrade, saving me money. Software companies cannot depend upon ever increasing chip speeds, they have to become better at producing efficient software in order to have the headroom for new features that used to be provided by ever increasing chip speed.
Advances in mobile computing are where it's at, and everyone knows that already ...
Antronman - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
Buddy, you've never built a PC, and I'm assuming that you don't have a hardware-heavy job.bji - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
Wrong on both counts.Shadowself - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
To some extent you're correct, but the reality is that the reasons are interdependent.Current performance increases from one generation to the next (Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge to Haswell and anticipated into Broadwell) are only 10% - 20% per generation. I, and many like me, buy at the top of the performance range and now use that machine for a few years so that we get a significant performance jump with each new machine purchased. Back 20+ years ago when each generation was 50% to 100% faster I upgraded each generation. It's just not worth it to do so anymore for just a 10% - 20% increase. The aggregate cost of purchasing machines every generation over a few years for such moderate increases in performance is too high.
Likely Intel (and AMD) are into the range of diminishing returns on performance increases. Unless there are huge architecture changes in the upcoming Skylake series I expect the 10% - 20% increase per generation to continue for at least three more generations -- Haswell to Broadwell, Broadwell to Skylake, and Skylake to Cannonlake -- (and maybe go to 5% -10% performance increase in the Skylake to Cannonlake transition).
Small increases in performance keep people from buying every generation. People not buying every generation limits profits and what can be put into IR&D. Limited IR&D produces small increases in performance. And the cycle repeats.
alacard - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
The increases over the past few generations have been no where near 10-20 percent.Sandy to Ivy was ~5 with that increase coming solely from power management/boost tweak. Clock for clock the cores perform identical (to get this metric you simply disable all the power management/boost functions in the bios and benchmark from there) with Ivy offering a slight decrease in consumed wattage.
The Ive to Haswell performance increase - with a few exceptions - is < 10% in almost all tests, with consumed wattage actually increasing from ivy.
Unfortunately, the Intel performance curve over the past 4 years is actually far more compressed than you paint in your post. With the exception of a couple of new task specific instructions we've had essentially less than 10% performance gains during that time
BadThad - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link
I agree Shadowself! I'm actually still mainly on a Q6600 system as it meets all of my needs. At last I'm at the point where I'm going to Z97 as the performance benefits and feature sets are finally worth it for my needs.