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Buying used i7-4790K now: worth it?

maxtch
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I have my Xeon E3-1231v3 for a while now, and I have even dialed in a 103.25MHz BCLK for a small overclock on my Z97 motherboard. However it was always on my roadmap to upgrade that CPU - it was i7-5775C but since Broadwell flopped on desktop my target is now i7-4790K with a hefty overclock.

 

Given the current state of the market, is it worth it to buy a second hand i7-4790K, or just wait further and replace the CPU/mobo in one go when things outgrow the current Xeon?

The Fruit Pie: Core i7-9700K ~ 2x Team Force Vulkan 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Gigabyte Z390 UD ~ XFX RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ WD Black 2TB ~ macOS Monterey amd64

The Warship: Core i7-10700K ~ 2x G.Skill 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Asus ROG Strix Z490-G Gaming Wi-Fi ~ PNY RTX 3060 12GB LHR ~ Samsung PM981 1.92TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
The ThreadStripper: 2x Xeon E5-2696v2 ~ 8x Kingston KVR 16GB DDR3-1600 Registered ECC ~ Asus Z9PE-D16 ~ Sapphire RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ Ubuntu Linux 20.04 amd64

The Question Mark? Core i9-11900K ~ 2x Corsair Vengence 16GB DDR4-3000 @ DDR4-2933 ~ MSI Z590-A Pro ~ Sapphire Nitro RX 580 8GB ~ Samsung PM981A 960GB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Home server: Xeon E3-1231v3 ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3-1600 Unbuffered ECC ~ Asus P9D-M ~ nVidia Tesla K20X 6GB ~ Broadcom MegaRAID 9271-8iCC ~ Gigabyte 480GB SATA SSD ~ 8x Mixed HDD 2TB ~ 16x Mixed HDD 3TB ~ Proxmox VE amd64

Laptop 1: Dell Latitude 3500 ~ Core i7-8565U ~ NVS 130 ~ 2x Samsung 16GB DDR4-2400 SO-DIMM ~ Samsung 960 Pro 512GB ~ Samsung 850 Evo 1TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Laptop 2: Apple MacBookPro9.2 ~ Core i5-3210M ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM ~ Intel SSD 520 Series 480GB ~ macOS Catalina amd64

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CPUs are not something I would buy second hand, they're a lot more likely to be severely abused and degraded than say a GPU which usually has a hard and extremely safe voltage limit unless you go through the trouble of BIOS editing which is obviously uncommon for the most part.

 

Consider the fact that a 4790k is likely to be $280-300 used even. 

 

hmvfY.png

 

And then consider that this CPU cost $190. And ask yourself if it's worth paying for the lack of performance per dollar. It's up to you. 

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7 minutes ago, maxtch said:

I have my Xeon E3-1231v3 for a while now, and I have even dialed in a 103.25MHz BCLK for a small overclock on my Z97 motherboard. However it was always on my roadmap to upgrade that CPU - it was i7-5775C but since Broadwell flopped on desktop my target is now i7-4790K with a hefty overclock.

 

Given the current state of the market, is it worth it to buy a second hand i7-4790K, or just wait further and replace the CPU/mobo in one go when things outgrow the current Xeon?

Depends on how much. As you can see I have one, and I've had it since mid 2017. It won't bottleneck a 1080 ti (unless its 1080p 240hz or some shit) so theres really no better deal for a gaming CPU. It has equal IPC to Ryzen and clocks higher, so it's better than Ryzen for gaming. 

CPU: INTEL Core i7 4790k @ 4.7Ghz - Cooling: NZXT Kraken X61 - Mobo: Gigabyte Z97X SLI - RAM: 16GB G.Skill Ares 2400mhz - GPU: AMD Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G - Case: Phanteks P350X - PSU: EVGA 750GQ - Storage: WD Black 1TB - Fans: 2x Noctua NF-P14s (Push) / 2x Corsair AF140 (Pull) / 3x Corsair AF120 (Exhaust) - Keyboard: Corsair K70 Cherry MX Red - Mouse: Razer Deathadder Chroma

Bit of an AMD fan I suppose. I don't bias my replies to anything however, I just prefer AMD and their products. Buy whatever the H*CK you want. 

---QUOTE ME OR I WILL LIKELY NOT REPLY---

 

 

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AS an owner of one since 2014, it's still relevant in todays market.

"Put as much effort into your question as you'd expect someone to give in an answer"- @Princess Luna

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 RGB Build Post 2019 --- Rainbow 🦆 2020 --- Velka 5 V2.0 Build 2021

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CPU i7-4790k    Motherboard Gigabyte Z97N-WIFI    RAM G.Skill Sniper DDR3 1866mhz    GPU EVGA GTX1080Ti FTW3    Case Corsair 380T   

Storage Samsung EVO 250GB, Samsung EVO 1TB, WD Black 3TB, WD Black 5TB    PSU Corsair CX750M    Cooling Cryorig H7 with NF-A12x25

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5 minutes ago, maxtch said:

is it worth it to buy a second hand i7-4790K

Would be a decend upgrade, but still depends on the price I'd say. If you can find a good deal on a Haswell/Devils Canyon go for it.

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5 minutes ago, violentnumeric said:

CPUs are not something I would buy second hand, they're a lot more likely to be severely abused and degraded than say a GPU which usually has a hard and extremely safe voltage limit unless you go through the trouble of BIOS editing which is obviously uncommon for the most part.

 

Consider the fact that a 4790k is likely to be $280-300 used even. 

 

hmvfY.png

 

And then consider that this CPU cost $190. And ask yourself if it's worth paying for the lack of performance per dollar. It's up to you.

The problem for me is not the lone price of re-buying a CPU, but also the motherboard and RAM on it. Especially RAM since my current system have 32GB on it, and it buying that much DDR4 RAM costs a fortune now.

The Fruit Pie: Core i7-9700K ~ 2x Team Force Vulkan 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Gigabyte Z390 UD ~ XFX RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ WD Black 2TB ~ macOS Monterey amd64

The Warship: Core i7-10700K ~ 2x G.Skill 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Asus ROG Strix Z490-G Gaming Wi-Fi ~ PNY RTX 3060 12GB LHR ~ Samsung PM981 1.92TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
The ThreadStripper: 2x Xeon E5-2696v2 ~ 8x Kingston KVR 16GB DDR3-1600 Registered ECC ~ Asus Z9PE-D16 ~ Sapphire RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ Ubuntu Linux 20.04 amd64

The Question Mark? Core i9-11900K ~ 2x Corsair Vengence 16GB DDR4-3000 @ DDR4-2933 ~ MSI Z590-A Pro ~ Sapphire Nitro RX 580 8GB ~ Samsung PM981A 960GB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Home server: Xeon E3-1231v3 ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3-1600 Unbuffered ECC ~ Asus P9D-M ~ nVidia Tesla K20X 6GB ~ Broadcom MegaRAID 9271-8iCC ~ Gigabyte 480GB SATA SSD ~ 8x Mixed HDD 2TB ~ 16x Mixed HDD 3TB ~ Proxmox VE amd64

Laptop 1: Dell Latitude 3500 ~ Core i7-8565U ~ NVS 130 ~ 2x Samsung 16GB DDR4-2400 SO-DIMM ~ Samsung 960 Pro 512GB ~ Samsung 850 Evo 1TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Laptop 2: Apple MacBookPro9.2 ~ Core i5-3210M ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM ~ Intel SSD 520 Series 480GB ~ macOS Catalina amd64

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5 minutes ago, Vegetable said:

Depends on how much. As you can see I have one, and I've had it since mid 2017. It won't bottleneck a 1080 ti (unless its 1080p 240hz or some shit) so theres really no better deal for a gaming CPU. It has equal IPC to Ryzen and clocks higher, so it's better than Ryzen for gaming. 

They never said anything about gaming. It's neck and neck at best in gaming (really, half as good when you consider the price), and just gets its ass blown out of the water into another ocean in multithreading.

 

Just now, maxtch said:

The problem for me is not the lone price of re-buying a CPU, but also the motherboard and RAM on it. Especially RAM since my current system have 32GB on it, and it buying that much DDR4 RAM costs a fortune now.

Well essentially it's almost never worth it to pay full price for a CPU (used or new) that is compatible with your current board, it's never going to be a huge step up from what you have. You're much better off waiting until you can make a significant upgrade instead of paying $300 for a 4% performance improvement. 

      __             __
   .-'.'     .-.     '.'-.
 .'.((      ( ^ `>     )).'.
/`'- \'._____\ (_____.'/ -'`\
|-''`.'------' '------'.`''-|
|.-'`.'.'.`/ | | \`.'.'.`'-.|
 \ .' . /  | | | |  \ . '. /
  '._. :  _|_| |_|_  : ._.'
     ````` /T"Y"T\ `````
          / | | | \
         `'`'`'`'`'`
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6 minutes ago, violentnumeric said:

they're a lot more likely to be severely abused and degraded than say a GPU

lol no. Thanks to miners theres no gpus in the used market that havent been abused these days...

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With the current RAM prices a full system upgrade is ridiculously expensive.

Right now I'm "stuck" on a 4790k and I would like to upgrade.

But no way I'm spending 200 euros on 16GB of RAM.

It is up to you to decide whether the ~15% increase in CPU clocks are worth it to you.

 

 

7 minutes ago, violentnumeric said:

CPUs are not something I would buy second hand, they're a lot more likely to be severely abused and degraded than say a GPU which usually has a hard and extremely safe voltage limit unless you go through the trouble of BIOS editing which is obviously uncommon for the most part.

With regards to buying second hand: I don't think that CPU lifespan is something you should worry about.

Selling your old CPU when you upgrade is a normal thing to do.

It's not like second hand CPUs are all "severely abused and degraded".

 

Desktop: Intel i9-10850K (R9 3900X died 😢 )| MSI Z490 Tomahawk | RTX 2080 (borrowed from work) - MSI GTX 1080 | 64GB 3600MHz CL16 memory | Corsair H100i (NF-F12 fans) | Samsung 970 EVO 512GB | Intel 665p 2TB | Samsung 830 256GB| 3TB HDD | Corsair 450D | Corsair RM550x | MG279Q

Laptop: Surface Pro 7 (i5, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD)

Console: PlayStation 4 Pro

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1 minute ago, black0utm1rage said:

lol no. Thanks to miners theres no gpus in the used market that havent been abused these days...

Well that's on you if you buy low priced GPUs from sketchy dealers. 99.9%+ of GPUs on the market are going to have stock BIOS and therefore are pretty much guaranteed never to have been damaged by extreme overvolting. With a CPU any dumb kid in the world can go into the BIOS and set the voltage to 1.6v on the stock cooler. 

      __             __
   .-'.'     .-.     '.'-.
 .'.((      ( ^ `>     )).'.
/`'- \'._____\ (_____.'/ -'`\
|-''`.'------' '------'.`''-|
|.-'`.'.'.`/ | | \`.'.'.`'-.|
 \ .' . /  | | | |  \ . '. /
  '._. :  _|_| |_|_  : ._.'
     ````` /T"Y"T\ `````
          / | | | \
         `'`'`'`'`'`
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1 minute ago, violentnumeric said:

They never said anything about gaming. It's neck and neck at best in gaming (really, half as good when you consider the price), and just gets its ass blown out of the water into another ocean in multithreading.

They never said what they were doing at all so I was taking a wild guess. Thanks for that tho. Anyways yeah if your Ryzen is at 4.1ghz with 3200mhz ddr4 then it might be around my i7 at stock. Then you factor in my 4.6ghz and 2133mhz ddr3 (1600 was standard for ddr3) and its another 5-10% faster. Thats the only reason I didnt get a 1600, I would have been losing fps.  And yeah the multithreading is great because more cores for more whores but ive yet to find a game that maxes my CPU so meh. 

CPU: INTEL Core i7 4790k @ 4.7Ghz - Cooling: NZXT Kraken X61 - Mobo: Gigabyte Z97X SLI - RAM: 16GB G.Skill Ares 2400mhz - GPU: AMD Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G - Case: Phanteks P350X - PSU: EVGA 750GQ - Storage: WD Black 1TB - Fans: 2x Noctua NF-P14s (Push) / 2x Corsair AF140 (Pull) / 3x Corsair AF120 (Exhaust) - Keyboard: Corsair K70 Cherry MX Red - Mouse: Razer Deathadder Chroma

Bit of an AMD fan I suppose. I don't bias my replies to anything however, I just prefer AMD and their products. Buy whatever the H*CK you want. 

---QUOTE ME OR I WILL LIKELY NOT REPLY---

 

 

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Just now, violentnumeric said:

can go into the BIOS and set the voltage to 1.6v on the stock cooler.

Yeah right... On CPUs and Mainboards with locked multipliers and locked voltage settings. Most cpus of the last Intel generations couldn't be overclocked at all. And if you bought AMD thats on you anyways...

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12 minutes ago, maxtch said:

The problem for me is not the lone price of re-buying a CPU, but also the motherboard and RAM on it. Especially RAM since my current system have 32GB on it, and it buying that much DDR4 RAM costs a fortune now.

image.png.596932c4c76488d7dfd0b7d262f92a3d.png

image.png.d625793123bfa9da45faacebcc537776.png

 

Your little benchmark tends to be very biased in favor of the 1600. You are only showing your overclock potential vs a stock chip... a stock chip that will have a lot of overclock headroom still left on it. So for your 2 more cores you are getting less than 10% more multi-thread performance, but you also have a MUCH lower single thread rating.   1600 =1828  vs the 4790k at 2530.

 

So the reason the 4790k prices are still high even used... is because it is still a very powerful chip and will out perform the 1600 or even 1600x once you overclock it to an equal level as you are showing in your comparison.

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My use case is actually CAD and software development, which 1) scales linearly, 2) can eat up as many cores and threads you can throw at it, depending on the scale of the project, and 3) really loves RAM and storage IOPS.

 

The current RAM prices really hurt since I do need 4GB RAM for each thread. I don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on 32GB even 48GB of DDR4 RAM if I go Kaby Lake or Ryzen. My current sticks of DDR3 RAM was bought before the entire crypto currency craze. I am locked on the sub-optimal GTX 1060 3GB graphics card even.

The Fruit Pie: Core i7-9700K ~ 2x Team Force Vulkan 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Gigabyte Z390 UD ~ XFX RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ WD Black 2TB ~ macOS Monterey amd64

The Warship: Core i7-10700K ~ 2x G.Skill 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Asus ROG Strix Z490-G Gaming Wi-Fi ~ PNY RTX 3060 12GB LHR ~ Samsung PM981 1.92TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
The ThreadStripper: 2x Xeon E5-2696v2 ~ 8x Kingston KVR 16GB DDR3-1600 Registered ECC ~ Asus Z9PE-D16 ~ Sapphire RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ Ubuntu Linux 20.04 amd64

The Question Mark? Core i9-11900K ~ 2x Corsair Vengence 16GB DDR4-3000 @ DDR4-2933 ~ MSI Z590-A Pro ~ Sapphire Nitro RX 580 8GB ~ Samsung PM981A 960GB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Home server: Xeon E3-1231v3 ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3-1600 Unbuffered ECC ~ Asus P9D-M ~ nVidia Tesla K20X 6GB ~ Broadcom MegaRAID 9271-8iCC ~ Gigabyte 480GB SATA SSD ~ 8x Mixed HDD 2TB ~ 16x Mixed HDD 3TB ~ Proxmox VE amd64

Laptop 1: Dell Latitude 3500 ~ Core i7-8565U ~ NVS 130 ~ 2x Samsung 16GB DDR4-2400 SO-DIMM ~ Samsung 960 Pro 512GB ~ Samsung 850 Evo 1TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Laptop 2: Apple MacBookPro9.2 ~ Core i5-3210M ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM ~ Intel SSD 520 Series 480GB ~ macOS Catalina amd64

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If you wonna waste money on a everything needed to go to a fancy new chip, or same money and get something better then what you have for a third of the price.

Main RIg Corsair Air 540, I7 9900k, ASUS ROG Maximus XI Hero, G.Skill Ripjaws 3600 32GB, 3090FE, EVGA 1000G5, Acer Nitro XZ3 2560 x 1440@240hz 

 

Spare RIg Lian Li O11 AIR MINI, I7 4790K, Asus Maximus VI Extreme, G.Skill Ares 2400 32Gb, EVGA 1080ti, 1080sc 1070sc & 1060 SSC, EVGA 850GA, Acer KG251Q 1920x1080@240hz

 

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I have bought half a dozen used CPUs on eBay with nothing but good results. If you find a decent price from a preferred seller go for it. I imagine anyone who says no has never tried and is ruled by fear.

Black Knight-

Ryzen 5 5600, GIGABYTE B550M DS3H, 16Gb Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000mhz, Asrock RX 6800 XT Phantom Gaming,

Seasonic Focus GM 750, Samsung EVO 860 EVO SSD M.2, Intel 660p Series M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe, Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon

 

Daughter's Rig;

MSI B450 A Pro, Ryzen 5 3600x, 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000mhz, Silicon Power A55 512GB SSD, Gigabyte RX 5700 Gaming OC, Corsair CX430

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5 hours ago, maxtch said:

I have my Xeon E3-1231v3 for a while now, and I have even dialed in a 103.25MHz BCLK for a small overclock on my Z97 motherboard. However it was always on my roadmap to upgrade that CPU - it was i7-5775C but since Broadwell flopped on desktop my target is now i7-4790K with a hefty overclock.

 

Given the current state of the market, is it worth it to buy a second hand i7-4790K, or just wait further and replace the CPU/mobo in one go when things outgrow the current Xeon?

it's not worth it at all...you would get a few hundreds megahertz extra but that wont change much...what your CPU can do the 4790K can do the same and where your cpu would struggle the 4790K will struggle just as much...

save your money and wait for newer CPU's to come out...your current CPU is plenty.

| CPU: Core i7-8700K @ 4.89ghz - 1.21v  |  Motherboard: Asus ROG STRIX Z370-E GAMING  |  CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i V2 |
| GPU: MSI RTX 3080Ti Ventus 3X OC  |  RAM: 32GB T-Force Delta RGB 3066mhz |
| Displays: Acer Predator XB270HU 1440p Gsync 144hz IPS Gaming monitor | Oculus Quest 2 VR

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^^

agree with nanoflutes

 

id save and move to a drr4 platform in the future ryzen is awesome and has a new line out next month

 

 

-13600kf 

- 4000 32gb ram 

-4070ti super duper 

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