4790K or Keep my 4790

[DarkHunter970]

So I currently have a Core i7 4790 non-K in my system right now. Would it be worth it to try and get the K version or should i just leave it alone and not get it?

[fire219]

Not worth it. The thing is, most Z class mobos will still let you OC non-K CPUs. (It's not just Skylake systems. My non-K 3570 clocks up to 4Ghz). 

And of course, OCing only really gets a noticeable performance difference when benchmarking.

[suchamoneypit]

Its probably not worth the cost of upgrading. Even if you sold the 4790 you would take a loss because its used, then you would have to buy a 4790k at full price (unless you bought it used).

[DarkHunter970]

Okay Thanks! 

[froot]

unless you have an overclocking motherboard I wouldnt recomend it.

[DarkHunter970]

4 minutes ago, froot said:

unless you have an overclocking motherboard I wouldnt recomend it.

I have a MSI Z97S Krait Edition

[froot]

ok thats an overclocking mother board. its your choice, if you already have that an an aftermarket cooler you could get a new cpu.

2 minutes ago, DarkHunter970 said:

I have a MSI Z97S Krait Edition

 

[stealth80]

Stick with what you have, save your money and upgrade to enthusiast in a year or a so, that upgrade would be a waster at the moment

[DarkHunter970]

So would it be a good idea to try and attempt to OC this thing? And yes, I know that K series Chips are the only ones that can OC.

[stealth80]

you cant really overly oc it, if you have a Z97/87 chipset you may be able to overclock the bus but the most you will gain is like 100mhz. Just hold your guns, save some cash and jump on Kabylake or Skylake-E next year

[PlayStation 2]

4 minutes ago, DarkHunter970 said:

So would it be a good idea to try and attempt to OC this thing? And yes, I know that K series Chips are the only ones that can OC.

Just keep the 4790. If you upgrade, go to at least Haswell-E or wait for Broadwell-E.

[DarkHunter970]

Okay, thanks for all the replies so far!

[Lord_Karango17]

If you have a Z class motherboard, you should be able to bump up the multiplier a few clicks above stock.

For example, my 3770 could reach 3.9 ghz on 1 core stock, but I was able to raise the multiplier to 41 allowing the cpu to reach 4.1 ghz on all 4 cores. After a certain point (41 for me) increases in the multiplier wont take effect, so that is the only problem with the non k chips.

Also in games, overclocking the cpu will likely not make a tangible improvement in performance, so you would be better off not bothering with changing the cpu.

[SteveGrabowski0]

21 minutes ago, fire219 said:

Not worth it. The thing is, most Z class mobos will still let you OC non-K CPUs. (It's not just Skylake systems. My non-K 3570 clocks up to 4Ghz). 

And of course, OCing only really gets a noticeable performance difference when benchmarking.

In Ivy Bridge you could always overclock 4 or 5 steps on the multiplier, right? Not so on Haswell. Especially not so with his board, at least if he has the newest BIOS. I have the exact board he does (Z97S Krait) and I can't do the enhanced turbo on my E3-1231v3.

[DarkHunter970]

1 minute ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

In Ivy Bridge you could always overclock 4 or 5 steps on the multiplier, right? Not so on Haswell. Especially not so with his board, at least if he has the newest BIOS. I have the exact board he does (Z97S Krait) and I can't do the enhanced turbo on my E3-1231v3.

I don't think I've ever updated my BIOS, but I probably should huh?

[SteveGrabowski0]

1 minute ago, DarkHunter970 said:

I don't think I've ever updated my BIOS, but I probably should huh?

It depends which BIOS you have. The BIOS it launched with might have really sucked based on the OC3D review of the board where it got killed by other MSI boards in gaming performance. But that seems to have been taken care of in later BIOS based on the Hexus.net review of the Z97S Krait, which was very positive. I know the newest BIOS (A.6 from August 2015) doesn't have an Enhanced Turbo setting, but I think some older BIOS do. I didn't bother to flash to an older BIOS since it only gives a 200 MHz bump (e.g., on my E3-1231v3 it would bump quadcore turbo from 3.6 GHz to 3.8 GHz and on your i7-4790 it would bump quadcore turbo from 3.8 GHz to 4.0 GHz).

[SteveGrabowski0]

And you can brick your board if you lose power while flashing BIOS. I actually had it happen to me around 2001 or 2002 during a rolling blackout and I had to get a new BIOS chip to use my system again.

[fire219]

1 minute ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

And you can brick your board if you lose power while flashing BIOS. I actually had it happen to me around 2001 or 2002 during a rolling blackout and I had to get a new BIOS chip to use my system again.

Flashing the BIOS used to be dangerous (like in 2001-2, as your story), but modern mobos tend to have safeguards against being totally bricked.

[SteveGrabowski0]

With a 4790k you'd probably be able to run it at 4.5 GHz, so you'd get an 18% bump to clockrate on quadcore loads at that speed. It would help in really cpu bound games like Fallout 4 or Arma III, and would get you higher minimum framerates in many games. But that's an expensive upgrade to make when it's not going to net you a lot of gain.

If you're using slower RAM like DDR3-1333 or DDR3-1600, upgrading to faster RAM can also give you a nice boost in CPU bound scenarios. For instance, on my Xeon E3-1231v3 + GTX 970 system upgrading to DDR3-2400 from DDR3-1600 brought up my minimum framerates in GTA V by 9.5% and Fallout 4 by 15%. @MageTank reports similar gaming results with DDR4, and Digitial Foundry has shown this with both DDR3 and DDR4. It's a cheap upgrade than can help enhance the cpu power you already have, and you have a lot with a 3.8 GHz i7-4790. I think I paid $83 for my 2x8 GB kit of CAS 11 G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-2400, and then moved my 2x4GB kit of CAS 11 G.Skill Value RAM DDR3-1600 to my living room HTPC. And running the RAM at the full overclocked speed was just as easy as going into the BIOS and clicking the XMP button at the top left.

[DunePilot]

Not worth it under any scenario I can think of other than down the road picking up a used one for less than 100 and retiring it to a secondary workstation. 

 

[0ld_Chicken]

42 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

With a 4790k you'd probably be able to run it at 4.5 GHz, so you'd get an 18% bump to clockrate on quadcore loads at that speed. It would help in really cpu bound games like Fallout 4 or Arma III, and would get you higher minimum framerates in many games. But that's an expensive upgrade to make when it's not going to net you a lot of gain.

If you're using slower RAM like DDR3-1333 or DDR3-1600, upgrading to faster RAM can also give you a nice boost in CPU bound scenarios. For instance, on my Xeon E3-1231v3 + GTX 970 system upgrading to DDR3-2400 from DDR3-1600 brought up my minimum framerates in GTA V by 9.5% and Fallout 4 by 15%. @MageTank reports similar gaming results with DDR4, and Digitial Foundry has shown this with both DDR3 and DDR4. It's a cheap upgrade than can help enhance the cpu power you already have, and you have a lot with a 3.8 GHz i7-4790. I think I paid $83 for my 2x8 GB kit of CAS 11 G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-2400, and then moved my 2x4GB kit of CAS 11 G.Skill Value RAM DDR3-1600 to my living room HTPC. And running the RAM at the full overclocked speed was just as easy as going into the BIOS and clicking the XMP button at the top left.

I just paid 1.80$ total to upgrade to used 2400mhz by selling my 1600 on ebay.  I noticed a 5% average and 10% minimum FPS improvement in gta V.  I didn't run numbers for much else but far cry 4 seems a bit smoother.