Test Setup & Overclocking

I would like to thank the following for providing testing hardware for this review: ASUS, HighSpeedPC.com, and Kingston Technology.

We keep it fairly simple for testing, by comparing the Intel Core i7-4770K to the Intel Core i7-4790K in a show-down of hotly-debated proportions.



Overclocking the Intel Core i7-4790K actually proved to be picky and rather problematic at times. Adjusting the multiplier to get more than stock speed while air-cooling was not easy given the clock ratios were not fixed. I first changed the BCLK to 102 MHz, giving it a slight bump. I followed this up with a 48x multiplier and set the voltage to 1.340 V, which netted me a 4.9 GHz clock speed similar to what Intel Core i7-4770K users see, although it was cutting it close. Attempts to push past 4.9 GHz, no matter whether Vtt/QPI or VCore was increased, yielded a system that failed to boot or, at worst, the HDD was not detected due to the SATA ports not working at the higher clock.