9900k VS 4790K

[frdmftr]

I have only ran a couple of benchmarks but overclocking my 4790k to 4.895 GHZ nets me better single core performance than the AVERAGE 9900k. Has Intel actually made any improvements other than core count and fab size??? Given the 10% generational increase in IPC there should be now way a 4790k even comes close to a 9900k in single threaded apps regardless of the benchmark used. 10% increase per generation for 5 generations is a 64% increase

 

[phanbuey]

should be about 580 single core for a 9900k, my 7820x @4.6 gets about 546;

single core cpu-z isn't really much of an indicative bench, you want to bench games/apps etc. Overall they have made strides but st performance has been fairly stagnant for years as the underlying tech is the same and the clockspeeds have been topped out around 4.7-5ish ghz.

 

[hzy4]

Your 4790K has to be a golden chip, mine did max 4,7Ghz at 1.44v. From what I have red and heard most of them did not go over 4,7Ghz. I had a CPU-Z score of 518, your score seems too high for 4,9Ghz. And the 3700x hits 520 points so I dont know how accurate your comparison is.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

That's weird, they have the 8700k at 530.
I get 540 stock and 580 @ 5ghz.
I think I seen a post somewhere that a bunch of people only boost to 4.4ghz where mine definitely boosts to 4.7ghz.

 

[frdmftr]

There are plenty of benchmarks out there that show comparisons between these 2 but the 9900k boosts to 5ghz and the 4790k to 4.4. My question and point is; is there any difference when you remove the 600mhz advantage for the 9900k. Or if you have a golden chip and can push it to 5ghz are they essentially the same aside from the additional cores of course.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

There are plenty of benchmarks out there that show comparisons between these 2 but the 9900k boosts to 5ghz and the 4790k to 4.4. My question and point is; is there any difference when you remove the 600mhz advantage for the 9900k. Or if you have a golden chip and can push it to 5ghz are they essentially the same aside from the additional cores of course.

I'd say no.
Maybe on basic CPU compute but you get a better memory controller some minor but important instruction sets and better security without losing performance.
However I wouldn't upgrade from a 4790 until DDR5 hits.

 

[TheMadDutchDude]

One benchmark that’s not even worthy of being called a benchmark at worst is hardly a way to compare a chip...

Try single threaded Cinebench or something like that.

 

[EarthDog]

I have only ran a couple of benchmarks but overclocking my 4790k to 4.895 GHZ nets me better single core performance than the AVERAGE 9900k. Has Intel actually made any improvements other than core count and fab size??? Given the 10% generational increase in IPC there should be now way a 4790k even comes close to a 9900k in single threaded apps regardless of the benchmark used. 10% increase per generation for 5 generations is a 64% increase

Yikes... there isn't a 10% increase gen over gen (IPC) where did you get that information from???!???

The difference between Haswell and Coffee-Lake IPC is single digits IIRC.

If you want to know the difference in IPC, you need to run both at the same speeds using the same test.

However I wouldn't upgrade from a 4790 until DDR5 hits.

I wouldn't hold my breath.

That said, AMD and Intel offer great options currently and DDR5 really isn't going to offer more than increased bandwidth........which isn't an issue.

 

[hzy4]

There are plenty of benchmarks out there that show comparisons between these 2 but the 9900k boosts to 5ghz and the 4790k to 4.4. My question and point is; is there any difference when you remove the 600mhz advantage for the 9900k. Or if you have a golden chip and can push it to 5ghz are they essentially the same aside from the additional cores of course.

Post you Cinebench single thread score at 4,9Ghz and compare.
I was not able to find results for the same clock speeds only this.

 

[R-T-B]

In terms of IPC, Haswell and all Skylake cores are within a few percent of eachother.

There is nothing new or earthshattering about this. We literally knew that was the expected advance prior to Skylake launch...

 

[Deleted member 67555]

That said, AMD and Intel offer great options currently and DDR5 really isn't going to offer more than increased bandwidth........which isn't an issue.

I know...I just use that as a generic term because I don't think Intel is going to actually have anything new until they upgrade the entire platform (for reals) until DDR5...So just wait until they do...it's not worth it....Unless you play both of those games that need MOAR cOres!...haha

 

[R-T-B]

Unless you play both of those games that need MOAR cOres!...haha

I play the gentoo...

(Even for this, 8 cores is great).

 

[frdmftr]

Thank you all for the replies.
I have had a bad case of the upgrade bug lately and after doing a fresh install on an M.2 drive I feel like my system has a new lease. I did find a thread posted on Guru 3d and they have done testing with processors locked at 3.5 GHz. Looks like the per core difference is just under 14% between haswell and coffee...Really 5 generations and only 14%??? As for the 10% i dont recall anything exactly but every time a new proc comes out I always seem to hear "A 10% increase" tagged to it, guess I just assumed.

 

[phanbuey]

Thank you all for the replies.
I have had a bad case of the upgrade bug lately and after doing a fresh install on an M.2 drive I feel like my system has a new lease. I did find a thread posted on Guru 3d and they have done testing with processors locked at 3.5 GHz. Looks like the per core difference is just under 14% between haswell and coffee...Really 5 generations and only 14%??? As for the 10% i dont recall anything exactly but every time a new proc comes out I always seem to hear "A 10% increase" tagged to it, guess I just assumed.

That's because they're tweaking the boost clocks to go higher so they can say that. Clock per clock it's the same stuff.

 

[EarthDog]

It's what happens when there was zero competition... why innovate?

 

[Vario]

Thank you all for the replies.
I have had a bad case of the upgrade bug lately and after doing a fresh install on an M.2 drive I feel like my system has a new lease. I did find a thread posted on Guru 3d and they have done testing with processors locked at 3.5 GHz. Looks like the per core difference is just under 14% between haswell and coffee...Really 5 generations and only 14%??? As for the 10% i dont recall anything exactly but every time a new proc comes out I always seem to hear "A 10% increase" tagged to it, guess I just assumed.

All the Lakes are the same architecture with varying core counts.

Sandy to Ivy was miniscule improvement, worse overclocks but PCIE3.0. Ivy to Haswell was miniscule improvement, Haswell brought M2 NVMe x2 but those SSD were too expensive. Haswell to Broadwell was only interesting for the EDRAM, Broadwell didn't overclock well, and Haswell actually outperformed it when both were peak overclocked because it had another +300 MHz potential. Haswell to Skylake was interesting for the DDR4 and M2 NVMe x4. Skylake to Kabylake was no difference. Kabylake to Coffeelake added more cores.

Really the only reason to upgrade from Sandy bridge was to gain NVMe, DDR4, and more cores. Only reason to upgrade from Sky/Kabylake was for more cores that came with Coffeelake.

 

[hzy4]

Was this just a hypothetical question about the single core performance of the 4790K? Are you trying to justify an upgrade? My 4790K was bottlenecking my RTX 2070 in games that used more then 4 cores which most of them do now days.

 

[frdmftr]

Was this just a hypothetical question about the single core performance of the 4790K? Are you trying to justify an upgrade? My 4790K was bottlenecking my RTX 2070 in games that used more then 4 cores which most of them do now days.

I just rebuilt my office comp and it had me wanting to upgrade the home system as well. I picked up a 2700x for $200 on prime day for the office. It is a good proc but lacks the umph in the small stuff my 4790K seems to have. Really just looking for an upgrade path but after doing some research it looked like the single core was the similar which surprised me as the 4790k is 5 gen old now. I game at 4k on older titles so the processor is not the issue.

Based on the responses here it looks like the 4790k and Vega 56 will be staying for another year.

All very surprising as a 5 gen old GPU would be a Nvidia 600 series, anyone still gaming with a 660,? lol!

 

[Chrispy_]

Thank you all for the replies.
I have had a bad case of the upgrade bug lately and after doing a fresh install on an M.2 drive I feel like my system has a new lease. I did find a thread posted on Guru 3d and they have done testing with processors locked at 3.5 GHz. Looks like the per core difference is just under 14% between haswell and coffee...Really 5 generations and only 14%??? As for the 10% i dont recall anything exactly but every time a new proc comes out I always seem to hear "A 10% increase" tagged to it, guess I just assumed.

Yeah, my 5-year-old i7 4790 feels long in the tooth but at a sedate 4.0GHz all-core with 32GB of DDR3 it would still mean dropping £600 ($750) for the obvious sweet-spot upgrade of an R7 3700X in a half-decent B450 board. My gaming PC is actually even older hardware (2600K at stock speeds) yet it has NVMe storage, a modern GPU and display, and the latest OS. I guess I'm missing RGBLED and Thunderbolt but somehow I think I'll probably survive without these must-have features. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Admittedly, most of my current games do not use more than 4 cores but that's because I steer clear of Ubisoft/EA AAA DLC-cashgrabs with questionably-legal lootbox/P2W mechanics at their heart. I'm never sure if those games need >4C because they're genuinely CPU-intensive, or whether it's just because they're coded by underpaid, exhausted, inexperienced interns in the AAA sweathshops.

A lot of the fun games are either single-threaded indie ones, or cross-platform stuff designed to run well for current-gen consoles with all the CPU horsepower of a decade-old Atom netbook. Whether I get 150fps or 200fps on my 75Hz display doesn't really make a meaningful difference to me, and if the framerates dare to dip into only double digits, I'd bet my left testicle that it's a GPU bottleneck anyway and no fault of my 8-year-old Sandy Bridge CPU.

 

[Wavetrex]

Given the 10% generational increase in IPC

Those that still think that Intel gives 10% generational really need to cut down on the stuff they are snorting.
It's more around 5-6%, and only when the architecture changed (eg: Haswell-> Skylake)
(9900K is -still- Skylake, even if it has another name. They simply pumped up the number of cores to 6 and then 8)

The rest of the extra performance is simply from higher base (and turbo) clocks, as well as transition from DDR3 to DDR4 which obviously resulted in less "waiting" for CPU, making it faster.
Too bad we can't pair 2700K (Sandy Bridge) with 4000 MT/s DDR4, because it would probably be almost as fast in single core as 9900K (considering that one also overclocked to 4.8-5.0... somehow!)

Why do you think that so many people are pissed at Intel for giving same old quad cores with single-digit architecture to architecture advances, since Sandy Bridge ?
And there weren't even that many architectures:
Sandy Bridge -> Haswell -> Skylake. THAT IS IT.

SB -> Ivy Bridge -> H, or H -> Broadwell * -> S, and now S -> Kaby Lake -> Coffee Lake are simply die shrinks (or "optimizations"), with very tiny tweaks, but nothing that actually boosts IPC significantly. Same cache sizes, same number of execution units... and they only did them to save money, by making the die smaller and cheaper to produce.
* Broadwell was actually a regression, it just couldn't clock as high as Haswell, so all Broadwell chips were slower than those that were "replaced". Massive fail. People still bought them... there was not much choice from the competition at the time. Bulldozer era. Ewww.



It was a very dark and terrible time in computing...

This table on Wikipedia pretty much sums it up:

Same CPU core, over and over and over again with extremely tiny changes.
Maybe Ice Lake is actually better, but it's stuck on a completely broken process... so I would ignore it for now until they get their s*it straight.

 

[purecain]

I still have a 4790s setup... I sold the k and rebuilt the pc and bought another cpu for £100. I sold my 4770k for £200. the pc plays everything and runs well with a 1660ti AMP on a asus maximus vii extreme. the 3900x is a lot quicker but the intel set up is still great if your not streaming etc...

 

[Vario]

Those that still think that Intel gives 10% generational really need to cut down on the stuff they are snorting.
It's more around 5-6%, and only when the architecture changed (eg: Haswell-> Skylake)
(9900K is -still- Skylake, even if it has another name. They simply pumped up the number of cores to 6 and then 8)

The rest of the extra performance is simply from higher base (and turbo) clocks, as well as transition from DDR3 to DDR4 which obviously resulted in less "waiting" for CPU, making it faster.
Too bad we can't pair 2700K (Sandy Bridge) with 4000 MT/s DDR4, because it would probably be almost as fast in single core as 9900K (considering that one also overclocked to 4.8-5.0... somehow!)

Why do you think that so many people are pissed at Intel for giving same old quad cores with single-digit architecture to architecture advances, since Sandy Bridge ?
And there weren't even that many architectures:
Sandy Bridge -> Haswell -> Skylake. THAT IS IT.

SB -> Ivy Bridge -> H, or H -> Broadwell * -> S, and now S -> Kaby Lake -> Coffee Lake are simply die shrinks (or "optimizations"), with very tiny tweaks, but nothing that actually boosts IPC significantly. Same cache sizes, same number of execution units... and they only did them to save money, by making the die smaller and cheaper to produce.
* Broadwell was actually a regression, it just couldn't clock as high as Haswell, so all Broadwell chips were slower than those that were "replaced". Massive fail. People still bought them... there was not much choice from the competition at the time. Bulldozer era. Ewww.



It was a very dark and terrible time in computing...

This table on Wikipedia pretty much sums it up:
View attachment 130322

Same CPU core, over and over and over again with extremely tiny changes.
Maybe Ice Lake is actually better, but it's stuck on a completely broken process... so I would ignore it for now until they get their s*it straight.

Haswell was one of the few jumps forward between generations in single thread over the Sandy Bridge. This website is in French but the chart is easy to understand for non-francophone.

CPU : Sandy Bridge vs Ivy Bridge vs Haswell vs Skylake à 4 G - Intel Core i7-6700K, i5-6600K et Z170 : Skylake en test - HardWare.fr

Skylake débarque au sein des i7-6700K et i5-6600K. Associés à un nouveau Socket LGA 1151 et un nouveau chipset Z170, ces processeurs vous inciterons-t-ils à changer de machine ?

www.hardware.fr

Compared to Sandy Bridge, Skylake offers an average gain of 22.3% in application, and 1.5 points more in DDR4. It is in essence quite variable, since greater than 30% in some applications: the two rendering engines under 3ds, x264 and x265. Note that since the version used for this test, x265 has new versions even more optimized for the most recent CPU architectures and the gain then climbs to ... 60%! On the other hand under WinRAR and 7-zip the gains are less than 10%. Compared to Haswell the gain is of 5.5%, with in the worst case 1-3% (Visual Studio, Stockfish and Houdini).

 

[Wavetrex]

@Vario - Don't mistake software optimizations for improvements to the hardware architecture.
Rendering, Video encoding... this type of stuff is continuously worked on and obviously it will get faster in time.

But if you play some game which was released in 2012-2014 (or older), it's very likely the game wasn't tweaked to the bone for the newer architectures. Or hasn't changed at all.

If you remove all the 3D Render and Video Encode apps from that link you provided, what remains is 10-20% total gains from Sandy to Skylake.
That is absolutely terrible for 5 years of "progress". What's worse is that AFTER Skylake, there were no more improvements in IPC. None.

Same story like for Pentium 4 ... higher clocks, higher clocks, until the CPU is hotter than the surface of the sun.

---
But tbh, I'm not really blaming Intel for this... they did what any good capitalist company would do - Maximize profits by minimizing spending. Economics 101
The fault is all AMD for making that shit architecture which was no competition at all.

 

[Vario]

@Vario - Don't mistake software optimizations for improvements to the hardware architecture.
Rendering, Video encoding... this type of stuff is continuously worked on and obviously it will get faster in time.

But if you play some game which was released in 2012-2014 (or older), it's very likely the game wasn't tweaked to the bone for the newer architectures. Or hasn't changed at all.

If you remove all the 3D Render and Video Encode apps from that link you provided, what remains is 10-20% total gains from Sandy to Skylake.
That is absolutely terrible for 5 years of "progress". What's worse is that AFTER Skylake, there were no more improvements in IPC. None.

Same story like for Pentium 4 ... higher clocks, higher clocks, until the CPU is hotter than the surface of the sun.

---
But tbh, I'm not really blaming Intel for this... they did what any good capitalist company would do - Maximize profits by minimizing spending. Economics 101
The fault is all AMD for making that shit architecture which was no competition at all.

I don't blame either company, the industry is experiencing diminishing gains on silicon.

 

[Wavetrex]

I don't blame either company, the industry is experiencing diminishing gains on silicon.

Sorry, but no.
It was "diminishing gains" for several years and then suddenly a jump of 50% IPC (to Zen 1) ? And then another 15% present day to Zen 2 ?
No, it was just bad decisions on the top level, and bad engineering, bad expectations, a "perfect storm" of bad choices.

Luckily we're over that.

Anyway, @op , keep your Haswell CPU as long as you can play fine with it. As long as you don't do professional workloads that would actually benefit from 8 cores, there's not much need to change it.
It will probably be necessary only after launch of next gen consoles, when 8 cores is predicted to be -minimum- for smooth gameplay in new titles. But we're still many months away from that...