The Intel Haswell Refresh Review: Core i7-4790, i5-4690 and i3-4360 Tested

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• rajod1 - Thursday, May 29, 2014 - link

  I agree, waste of cash to upgrade every generation. Old days were nice. Intel said they would hit 10 GHZ by like 2004 or something. LOL. So they hit a wall but still needed cash. Lots of suckers born every minute that will upgrade for 10 percent increase.

• Hrel - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link

  The fact that hyperthreading is disabled on the i5's on the desktop is infuriating. Enabling it costs them nothing. Agree on the 8 core at $300, it should still have HT though.

• Flunk - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link

  Definitely, turn on HT on i5 and give them all 4 cores and offer an 8 core i7 with HT. i3s can soldier on with only 2 cores if they really want to.
  
  A i7 5770 with 8 cores and HT is what they really need to bring out, but I think they're waiting for AMD to bring out something better first.

• rajod1 - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link

  You may as well ask them to drop the I5 because if you put HT on a I5 its then I7.

• rajod1 - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link

  It does cost them something. They sell my I7s that way.

• bsim500 - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link

  Thanks for this review - appreciate the effort that went into it as always.
  
  "Also of note is the Z97 motherboard we used for these tests implements an Adaptive voltage profile, meaning that artificial loads such as OCCT push the voltage higher than normal, increasing power consumption at load"
  
  So they've still got that dumb Haswell "feature" of stuffing the Vcore up by +0.1v when you least want it? Also why are your power consumption figures so high in general? My i5-3570 @ 4.0Ghz barely pulls 37w idle / 88w 4-threads prime with a 7870 discrete card (whole system (excluding monitor) measured at the wall). That's roughly 25w lower both idle & load than your i3 (with a 1600MHz idle vs 800Mhz Haswell's)! Just out of curiosity, what where the stock / default VID's like on the i3-4360 / i5-4690? ie, has the clock speed bump increased required voltages much? Thanks.

• Ian Cutress - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link

  Adaptive is an Intel specification implementation, but for some reason goes haywire with certain 100% load simulators (OCCT/AIDA).
  
  With regards power consumption seeming high:
  a) Low efficiency band of the PSU. Hence me stating qualitative analysis more relevant than quantitative. Need to keep the PSU consistent across all the tests, some tests require 2x/3x GPUs (e.g. X79). This is probably a large part of it, but all tests are therefore done on the same efficiency curve.
  b) Using a Corsair H80i with two fans and ODD plugged in. I move the USB devices to USB 2.0 so any USB 3.0 controller can power down, but it still all adds up.
  c) OCCT loading does the adaptive voltage thing, causing more power consumption at load from idle.
  
  We got ES chips to test, so retail might have adjusted slightly on the stock VID. Also VID can differ from chip to chip in the same bin, so it's not really a good measure. One CPU can have a high VID in the bin, while the next bin up we could get a low VID, and it all look a bit odd.

• Daniel Egger - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link

  IMNSHO it is really ridiculous to test all systems with the same outlandish special PSUs that no sane person would ever use. Why not have a testbed for single card systems with say a platinum 500W PSU (which should cover even the nasty R295X2 plus a Haswell K processor) and a separate one for crazy setups? With those far sub 20% loads even under full load it is nearly impossible to get useful readings not to mention comparable ones since at these low loads lots of funny effects kick in skewing the results...

• wetwareinterface - Sunday, May 11, 2014 - link

  The reason you don't have a low end psu on your test bench is it's a test bench.
  The one setup should handle anything you can possibly throw at it and then a little extra for good measure.
  
  Also having the exact same high wattage psu to test everything on eliminates the psu as a differentiating factor when testing multiple system configurations.
  
  and finally the sad truth is there are several reviewers working for anandtech each from home and each with whatever they have laying around to do said testing with...

• Daniel Egger - Monday, May 12, 2014 - link

  > The reason you don't have a low end psu on your test bench is it's a test bench.
  The one setup should handle anything you can possibly throw at it and then a little extra for good measure.
  
  Exactly my point for suggesting a 500W PSU rather than something much lower that I would personally put into a build. That should be sufficient for any even just halfway reasonable setup.
  
  > Also having the exact same high wattage psu to test everything on eliminates the psu as a differentiating factor when testing multiple system configurations.
  
  Unfortunately that's not true. Very low output on high wattage PSUs skews the results quite a bit because they typically are not accurate enough when it comes to handling the low loads thus smearing over the results with their own losses. I assume this is also why our Greek friend here doesn't even bother to test loads below 5% (which would be 60W at a 1200W PSU, about twice as much as my current Haswell PC needs on an mostly Idle Windows desktop).