Devil's Canyon: Intel Core i7-4790K OC'ing and Review

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and ensured the memory speed was set to DDR3-1600 or DDR3-1333 on the Intel systems and DDR3-1866 on the AMD systems (each platform's maximum, officially supported speeds).

The Core i7-4790K in Gigabyte's Z97X SOC Force Motherboard

The solid state drives in the test systems were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2014 Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2013, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite with Intel's new Core i7-4790K processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 4GHz (4.4GHz Turbo) with 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force motherboard.

Processor Arithmetic	Processor Multi-Media
Memory Bandwidth	Cache and Memory Bandwidth