Where to get an i7 4790k?

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Kol12

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#205822 28-Nov-2016 16:18

Does anyone know where I might be able to find a brand new i7 4790k? I've checked Pricespy and it seems no one stocks it.

At a reasonable price too, I've seen a couple of stores have it but $600 +gst? What did it go for at time of initial release?

Really sorry, didn't realise geekzone had a price comparison...

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#1678975 28-Nov-2016 17:21

Honestly? The price just isn't going to be low enough to justify it - you're gonna be looking at around $500 NZ at the lowest to get one, I'd recommend holding fire and picking up a new Zen or Kabylake system early next year, or start sniffing around people who have too much money to spend on upgrades.

You might also get lucky and find a geekzone member who has a spare one with no home.

Out of curiosity, what do you want it for? To upgrade a system? Because you could probably pick up a non-k CPU a lot cheaper, as the k series targets high end gamers who overclock more than anything else, and there's nothing quite like buying expensive enthusiast gear that's a generation or two out, but is still highly relevant performance wise to hurt your wallet.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

CYaBro

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#1678977 28-Nov-2016 17:25

That CPU hasn't been around for a while so I doubt you'll get one brand new, unless someone has old stock sitting around.

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Batman

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#1678979 28-Nov-2016 17:34

what you really want is a 7700K. I guess that does mean a new mobo and ram ... maybe get z170 mobo that people are ditching for the

Kol12

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#1679063 28-Nov-2016 19:29

toejam316: Honestly? The price just isn't going to be low enough to justify it - you're gonna be looking at around $500 NZ at the lowest to get one, I'd recommend holding fire and picking up a new Zen or Kabylake system early next year, or start sniffing around people who have too much money to spend on upgrades. You might also get lucky and find a geekzone member who has a spare one with no home. Out of curiosity, what do you want it for? To upgrade a system? Because you could probably pick up a non-k CPU a lot cheaper, as the k series targets high end gamers who overclock more than anything else, and there's nothing quite like buying expensive enthusiast gear that's a generation or two out, but is still highly relevant performance wise to hurt your wallet.

Well I am a bit of gamer and it seems some of the newer games are recommending i7's. I can only imagine this is for the extra cores and threads. I understand it was widely recognized that more threads weren't of any benefit to gaming but maybe things are changing. I've only had my i5 4690k machine for almost two years now and at the time it was claimed that the 4690k was the gamer's chip of choice for at least 5 years. Notably the newly released Battlefield 1 recommends an i7 4790 or equivalent, I'm not obsessed but I like my games to run comfortably. That game currently has optimization issues but they won't be recommending the i7 for nothing... I recall the Witcher 3 recommended CPU was one of the lower i7's. I probably need to look up some more conclusive benchmarks and opinions. I would prefer to stick with my machine for at least 2-3 more years, I'm not made of money! An upgrade to the 1151 platform would likely be a waste of time and money, the 2011-v3 platform? maybe but pricey. I'll have to read up on Zen and Kabylake to see if it will be the next really big performance upgrade. It took me 8 years to upgrade from a core 2 duo/Q600 machine to the i5 platform.

Kol12

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#1679064 28-Nov-2016 19:30

joker97:

what you really want is a 7700K. I guess that does mean a new mobo and ram ... maybe get z170 mobo that people are ditching for the

Is it really going to be a huge performance gain over the last few gen's?

toejam316

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#1679066 28-Nov-2016 19:33

You will notice near zero gains changing from an i5 to an i7 - the i7 is still one physical core, with two threads executing on it. It's like every core has an assistant to make sure that the extra power it isn't using is going to something else.

Zen is supposedly going to be about the same performance-wise as Haswell/Broadwell, but notably cheaper, and with more cores and each core having SMT (AMD's version of Hyperthreading). Kabylake is a step over Skylake, not too much to gain, but hopefully will be socket compatible with Canonlake, and at worst will still lower Skylake prices.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

lNomNoml

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#1679071 28-Nov-2016 19:59

Kol12:

joker97:

what you really want is a 7700K. I guess that does mean a new mobo and ram ... maybe get z170 mobo that people are ditching for the

Is it really going to be a huge performance gain over the last few gen's?

Not really no, if you want to try and save money then i5 is fine for gaming.

toejam316: You will notice near zero gains changing from an i5 to an i7 - the i7 is still one physical core, with two threads executing on it. It's like every core has an assistant to make sure that the extra power it isn't using is going to something else. Zen is supposedly going to be about the same performance-wise as Haswell/Broadwell, but notably cheaper, and with more cores and each core having SMT (AMD's version of Hyperthreading). Kabylake is a step over Skylake, not too much to gain, but hopefully will be socket compatible with Canonlake, and at worst will still lower Skylake prices.

It's generally 4 physical cores with 4 threads and 4 hyper-threading threads which generally provide roughly 30% more processing power over an i5 processor running at the same GHz. An i5 is generally 4 physical cores with 4 threads as it generally has no hyper-threading.

Key word, "generally"

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toejam316

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#1679072 28-Nov-2016 20:06

You can't just say that it "generally" provides 30% more power - it provides no additional power, it just increases utilization closer to saturation.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

Kol12

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#1679113 28-Nov-2016 21:20

toejam316: You will notice near zero gains changing from an i5 to an i7 - the i7 is still one physical core, with two threads executing on it. It's like every core has an assistant to make sure that the extra power it isn't using is going to something else. Zen is supposedly going to be about the same performance-wise as Haswell/Broadwell, but notably cheaper, and with more cores and each core having SMT (AMD's version of Hyperthreading). Kabylake is a step over Skylake, not too much to gain, but hopefully will be socket compatible with Canonlake, and at worst will still lower Skylake prices.

Does that mean the same as in double Haswell's current power?

What do you mean by Kabylake being socket compatible with Canonlake? I take it Kabylake is coming first then Canonlake and Zen?

Kol12

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#1679115 28-Nov-2016 21:23

toejam316: You can't just say that it "generally" provides 30% more power - it provides no additional power, it just increases utilization closer to saturation.

Interesting, so of what benefit is the increased utilization that the hyperthreads provide?

toejam316

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#1679154 28-Nov-2016 22:10

Kabylake is Intel's next cpu, and it sits between skylake and cannonlake. It's high end cpu will be the 7700k, but it's unlikely to be much faster than the 6700k. That's due early next year, as is Zen, which is AMDs next set of CPUs. That looks to be blow for blow with Intel's 4xx0 CPUs, with each core being like an i7 core in that it can run two threads at once.

Cannonlake is after Kabylake, and is due iirc towards the end of 2017 or early 2018.

As for the benefits of hyperthreading, it's like having an extra hand. On a core i5, you have 4 cores capable of 4 tasks with each cores full attention on that task. With an i7 you still have 4 cores, but each core can do two tasks. This means that if you're doing something involved, the entire core can be devoted still, but if you're doing something a bit lighter, that spare power can be allocated to another task. Granted this is all Super simplified, but in most games there's no notable benefit from an i7 vs an i5.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

shrub

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#1679155 28-Nov-2016 22:11

So most games are developed on old game engines that are optimized for ps4/Xbone then ported to PC. New games engines like id tech 6 are still 4 core max so the difference between i3-i5 is small(10%) i5-i7 is nothing.

Battlefield 1 is the old BF4 engine....

http://www.techspot.com/review/1267-battlefield-1-benchmarks/page4.html

The recommendation for an i7 is likely for laptop processors.

edit - wrong link

Kol12

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#1679158 28-Nov-2016 22:35

shrub:

So most games are developed on old game engines that are optimized for ps4/Xbone then ported to PC. New games engines like id tech 6 are still 4 core max so the difference between i3-i5 is small(10%) i5-i7 is nothing.

Battlefield 1 is the old BF4 engine....

http://www.techspot.com/review/1267-battlefield-1-benchmarks/page4.html

The recommendation for an i7 is likely for laptop processors.

edit - wrong link

Yes, I wonder why Battlefield 1 is having so much problems right now, the game feels so unstable... The BF1 CPU recommendation is an i7 4790 or equivalent, that's not a laptop...

Maybe games like this do benefit somewhat (maybe) minimally from the hyperthreading which Toejam has explained rather well... How it is enough to make it the recommended CPU puzzles me though.

lNomNoml

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#1679176 28-Nov-2016 23:52

Kol12:

shrub:

So most games are developed on old game engines that are optimized for ps4/Xbone then ported to PC. New games engines like id tech 6 are still 4 core max so the difference between i3-i5 is small(10%) i5-i7 is nothing.

Battlefield 1 is the old BF4 engine....

http://www.techspot.com/review/1267-battlefield-1-benchmarks/page4.html

The recommendation for an i7 is likely for laptop processors.

edit - wrong link

Yes, I wonder why Battlefield 1 is having so much problems right now, the game feels so unstable... The BF1 CPU recommendation is an i7 4790 or equivalent, that's not a laptop...

Maybe games like this do benefit somewhat (maybe) minimally from the hyperthreading which Toejam has explained rather well... How it is enough to make it the recommended CPU puzzles me though.

I have a i7-4790K and play Battlefield 1 and it runs perfectly fine on all ultra settings paired with a GTX 980 Ti, CPU usage is around the 95% mark while gaming, stock speed of 4.0GHz.

darylblake

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#1679189 29-Nov-2016 07:34

You are going to want to go second hand.

I you replace the motherboard you will more than likely have to go from DDR3 -> DDR4 ram, with a new motherboard and a brand new chip.

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