iUpgraded to an i7: A 14* Day Journal

[Suika]

This is an interesting little thing I'd love to try, considering I've had an FX-8350 for so long, and noticed huge bottlenecks when I upgraded to a GTX 780. You can argue what you want but, considering I've had both an FX-8350 and now an i7-4790k, I'll be in a more special place to argue than a lot of people. I'm a regular consumer that loves to play games and edit various forms of media, I'd imagine what I experience will be better than what a benchmark would say. This is a rather drastic comparison because, of course a $300 chip will outperform a $150 chip, but I'm just going to see how severe the bottlenecks were.
 
At the end of the 14 days I want to see how much of an upgrade the i7 is, and if it was worth it, both at stock and with a small overclock. I'm not going to perform benchmarks because only hundreds of those exist, what's another few going to prove? I'm going to write off of experience, hopefully to show that a benchmark isn't the entire answer. I have no doubt in my mind how much of a better experience I'll have with the i7, but who knows? Maybe it won't be worth the extra cash.
 
All that said and done, I've already built the machine and installed all of the basic drivers I need to game and so on.
 
I'll leave a link to all of the days up here for an easy reference guide, and label ones that I notice something in particular. Day 1 starts on December 15th, when all of my games are installed.
 
Day 01 (I talk about gaming here)
Day 02
Day 03 (I talk about gaming here)
Day 04
Day 05 (temperatures and GIMP)
Day 06 (some more gaming)
Day 07 (some vidya editin')
Day 08 (Stock cooler is a no no)
Day 09 (TF2 bottlenecks with an 8350!)
Day 10

Day 11 (Photoshop is a billion times better with Intel)

[niofalpha]

Seems interesting... Subscribed to the post

[Enflics]

Great I'm looking forward to this

[Jackgamer91]

The i7 4790k is for beginners Try 5960x 

[Suika]

Day 01:

 

It's been an absolutely lovely day for me, considering I had two consecutive days off of work and school for the first time since... I think July. That college life, brah.

 

Anyway, I haven't done a whole lot asides from spend some hours on Metro: 2033. I never really appreciated that game but decided to try it out, having everything cranked up. The only difference I noticed was that, unlike when I played with my FX-8350, I'm not seeing any major dips in FPS. The drips were rather random with the 8350 but happened often enough that I could begin to predict where I'd see the FPS dip.It wasn't caused by the environment, it was just a random dip every once in awhile that I couldn't explain it. It wasn't ever game breaking but it was annoying, but since I've upgraded, I haven't see any that wasn't induced by the 780 falling behind from being pushed to 100%.

 

The dips mainly happened in Skyrim and Metro 2033, games where I'd legitimately float around the 60FPS mark because it's graphically intensive enough to do so to push my 780 so hard. I never noticed or felt them in TF2 or another game where I could easily achieve 200FPS or higher.

 

TF2 was, I mean it was TF2. There wasn't much more I could do with it. I have every setting to its highest and it feels buttery smooth. I think it feels a little smoother but I wouldn't be shocked if it was just perceived by the thought that I upgraded. Take it with a grain of salt. I need to try Mann vs. Machine, though, because I did notice a couple drops there from having lots of bots on the screen, maybe having the i7 will change that.

 

I'll have to try modding Skyrim again. I need to get it to bend my PC on its knees again, because that's the game saw major FPS drops from CPU intensive areas. Modded Skyrim has been my #1 example so I need to make sure I push it again.

[Suika]

Day 02

 

I haven't done anything major like, all day. I finished Metro: 2033, that was a pretty good game but I was almost expecting it to be longer.

 

I got NMM for Skyrim but didn't install mods, I might do some today and tomorrow. Boot up seems a little faster and smoother but I can't tell if that's because the install is fresh or it's because the i7 is just faster lol. I'll try some GIMP editing later on considering I haven't made a forum sig in forever. I should probably install Photoshop, too.

[NeatSquidYT]

Seems interesting, I like it

[LiamApex]

The i7 4790k is for beginners Try 5960x 

Not really thats why intel has the i3 i5 and i7 

[Jackgamer91]

Try overclocking the processor. The K-series chips (starting with the Sandy Bridge generation) love and are asking to be overclocked. I noticed a pretty significant increase in FPS (up to 10 fps) and in benchmarking (on Performancetest it goes up from 8700 to 9400) between my 2700K at stock and overclocked to 4.3 ghz on a GTX 970 (motherboard won't let me play with voltages, bummer). 

 

If your motherboard has voltage controls, you should get up to 4.6 ghz no problem with the 4790k. 

[SirSquid]

You should put the hyper threads to work with some multitasking.

[Suika]

Day 03

 

So I finally got a lot of my Skyrim mods back, most of the graphically and CPU intensive ones I've had. I still need some others but the jist of it is there.

 

Now the #1 source of FPS drops I got was from a mod that turned Falkreath into a more true to its name Imperial city, it's basically a city full of AI with massive walls, and with my 8350, if I ever walked through the area, it became unplayable. It was like that in several other cities because I made them larger and more full of life, too. Unfortunately I'm still noticing FPS drops, however they're not as severe and it looks like they can be fixed with a decent overclock. Gaming performance doesn't look drastically nicer than with the 8350 but still noticeably nicer and worth spending the couple extra dollars to get an i5 instead.

[Fate]

 

Do you plan on overclocking? 

[Suika]

Do you plan on overclocking? 

Originally it wasn't my intent, I only picked up the K variant because there wasn't a price difference at Microcenter, but I might give it a shot later in the journal. I just have to clean up my 212 EVO and get some extra room for fans. My motherboard has a disturbing lack of fan connectors.

[Timmy-P]

Originally it wasn't my intent, I only picked up the K variant because there wasn't a price difference at Microcenter, but I might give it a shot later in the journal. I just have to clean up my 212 EVO and get some extra room for fans. My motherboard has a disturbing lack of fan connectors.

Get a fan controller?

[helping]

Day 01:

 

I'm not seeing any major dips in FPS

I'm actually in the same exact boat as you, except I moved from a legacy BD 8c chip to a 4790k and have happily observed that there are never any FPS drops in Skyrim, and even 4k playback while running a lot of concurrent applications is much smoother.

I haven't bothered overclocking yet either, since 4.4Ghz turbo core is more than enough for anything I do. But I suppose I have some room since I'm hitting 70c at 4.4 turbo on unoptimized stock settings.

[othertomperson]

The i7 4790k is for beginners Try 5960x 

 

Doesn't the 4790k beat the 5960X in terms of single-core performance? I could be completely wrong about this, but I seem to recall reading a comparison somewhere.

[Suika]

I'm actually in the same exact boat as you, except I moved from a legacy BD 8c chip to a 4790k and have happily observed that there are never any FPS drops in Skyrim, and even 4k playback while running a lot of concurrent applications is much smoother.

I haven't bothered overclocking yet either, since 4.4Ghz turbo core is more than enough for anything I do. But I suppose I have some room since I'm hitting 70c at 4.4 turbo on unoptimized stock settings.

Yea, I mean when I had my 8350, it wasn't unplayable, and it never really bothered me, but since I no longer get those dips, it seems more pleasant lol. Skyrim is still smooth for me until I run into a mod that really stretches my PC's strength, but all still playable.

I'm waiting to see what kind of clocks I can get on just air cooling with a 212 considering stock has held up perfectly fine. Not beautiful temps but fine. I'm thinking 4.6GHz might be my stretch but that's a pretty nice boost anyway.

[Mao_Zedong]

Doesn't the 4790k beat the 5960X in terms of single-core performance? I could be completely wrong about this, but I seem to recall reading a comparison somewhere.

yes, they are mostly the same, but the 5960x has a lower average overclock. The 5820k is great because it has more cores and can overclock basically as high.

[othertomperson]

yes, they are mostly the same, but the 5960x has a lower average overclock. The 5820k is great because it has more cores and can overclock basically as high.

 

Well yeah it has more cores, but my comparison comes from the point of view of applications that don't gain anything by using more cores. Hence per-core performance comparison being the discerning factor.

 

Edit: sorry I re-read what you said and I agree. Generally more cores have a lower overclock, though, because the probability of them all being able to overclock as well as eachother is lower the more cores you have.

[bry.yyyy]

interesting

[Ptopman]

I'll be upgrading to an i7-4790k here in a week and just reading your posts, I want it even more. Only difference is that I multitask a lot while editing. Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, Mocha, etc.

[Suika]

Day 04

 

I got nothin', man. I was out all day, I finally got my TV and started playing Xbox, etc. 

 

I'll finally post temps and my experience with GIMP tomorrow.

[Suika]

Day 05

 

I got to use GIMP and, unlike previous experiences, it was rather pleasant. The entire time I was using it, it was buttery smooth and completely responsive outside of a few hiccups that come with any program or game. It booted up incredibly fast, even when I had my 8350 with GIMP on my SSD, there was always a short pause while booting, and I could never put my finger on what would be causing it. That short pause was either extremely short or just didn't exist when I tried it yesterday. It was even more horrid on my laptop that used an old Athlon X2 lol.

 

I'm no artist, but this is one of the better things I made in GIMP.

 

 

I'm much better with Photoshop lmao.

 

Now I said I didn't want to do any benchmarks, because hundreds of those exist anywhere else on the web, and that I wanted to focus on personal experience instead, but hey, even I need to check temps to make sure I'm not damaging my components, so here are some temps.

 

Complete stock settings, only a few minutes after boot up, I'm ranging from 28-32C. Coldest core ranging from 25-27C, hottest core ranging from 28-30C. Highest temp was 38C, lowest was 23C (I sit next to a cold window, which makes sense).

 

I ran Prime95, and the temperatures immediately sprung up to 60C and then continued rising. Average was 89-93C, but rose even further to 95-97C before I shut down Prime95. The hottest core was 99C and was actually Core 0, the core that scored the lowest idle. The coldest core was 91C.

 

Stock is completely unacceptable, I can never recommend a user to use the stock Intel cooler lmao. I've never used the AMD stock cooler, but I know for a fact it never got that how. Even when I had the 212 EVO, it would run load around 50C, so I'd imagine stock only getting to 70C. Man, when people accuse AMD CPUs of being molten, I'd love to know what Intel is.

[fababaa]

Really interesting topic, I've been waiting for a long time to see someone describe their personal experience with the FX-8350 and the i7 4790k.

Also, are you going to post a conclusion in the end of the 30 days? (Like, if you thought the upgrade was absolutely worth it and if you're really happy with it)

[Paralectic]

8350 doesn't bottleneck a 780 ..