The Intel Haswell Refresh Review: Core i7-4790, i5-4690 and i3-4360 Tested
by Ian Cutress on May 11, 2014 3:01 AM ESTGaming on Integrated Graphics
For our integrated graphics testing, we use most of the same gaming tests as our discrete gaming range, but at a lower resolution and quality settings (1280x1024, Low) in order to find a reasonable frame rate. Results are given in terms of average and minimum FPS reported. Each of the three CPUs in our test use GT2 / HD 4600 graphics and the same frequencies, meaning that the only difference is clock speeds and threads available. As a result, this should show us how relevant more cores and more threads are for Intel IGP gaming.
F1 2013
The HD 4600 at 1200 MHz falls just short of 60 FPS average on F1 2013, and moving up from the i3 seems to offer a 6% increase in minimum frame rates.
Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite seems memory bound a little, given how good Iris Pro is compared to the HD 4600 scores. There is almost a 10% jump from i3 to i5 here on average FPS and almost 20% in minimum FPS.
Tomb Raider
Tomb Raider with discrete GPUs is characteristally CPU agnostic, however moving from an i3 to an i5 gives and extra 5.5 FPS on average in our test.
Sleeping Dogs
Company of Heroes 2
No IGP solution is that well prepared for COH2, although some AMD CPUs and Iris Pro do hit above 20 FPS. We may have to wait another generation to make it more playable and hit 30 FPS at our resolution settings.
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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).