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i5 4690k vs i7 4790k

FL630

FL630

FL630

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9 Dec 2014
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Hertfordshire
Speccing new PC right now. Will be used for light to moderate gaming at 1440p, plus quite a lot of Photoshop and Illustrator, with the odd Premiere project thrown in for good measure. Planned GPU will be the GTX 970.

Is there any benefit to the i7 over the i5? It's likely the computer will be water cooled and overclocked so I guess it comes down to hyperthreading (which I'm not even sure what it is).

Normally if I'm gaming, there won't be much running in the background, if I'm designing I'll have music, browsers, PS, AI and ID running at the same time etc.

Shall I save my hard earned or is the extra cash worth it for the i7 in my situation?
 
Its all depands.
I have same problem now, I am plannig to order CPU next week.
I hope this september ill start studying computer science, and I wonder if i7 will be better choice then overcloced i5. 70 £ is not a big difference, but I can invest it into better cpu cooler or graphic card..
 
maklabouhlel said:
Looks like you know what you want or need.
Click to expand...

Not quite, I want the i7 but it is money I can invest in other places, I'm trying to balance the rig for what I need vs. budget.

From what I gather the i7 provides nothing over the i5 during gaming, but will I see any performance gain in the real world when using PS/AI/ID?

It's only £70 or so, but that the price of another hard drive, a ram upgrade or even nearly a water block for the GPU.
 
Would also recommend the 4790k for the uses you described. I think it's worth the extra £70, it will have a higher resell value also ofc.
 
You can get some reasonable gains (~15%) in some specific tasks like video encoding but in the main they're pretty similar in terms of performance :-

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-4790k-i5-4690k_6.html

Unless you're a Premiere fiend it's probably not really 'worth' the extra but I tend to give in a buy i7 version for the sake of an extra £70 given I normally keep my PCs for 4-5 years.

More fool me probably though!
 
The hyperthreading on the i7 means it appears to windows to have 8 cores rather than the 4 cores of the i5. They are not real full cores however so it's not twice as fast but in applications that can use multiple cores or when running multiple applications you will see an improvement in performance on the i7. Whether it's really 'worth' the extra money is hard to say and for purely gaming it's probably not but from your description of the types of work you'll be doing I would spend the extra go for the i7.
 
Plus, the i7 will probably last longer (as in still be useful for longer than the i5) and will have better resell value at the end of its journey.
 
i7 it is then, thanks for the advice! It might mean I will air cool (probably a Coolermaster 212) for a while until I can get the water cooling in there, but no big deal as I'm only going water for the looks!

Cheers
 
FL630 said:
i7 it is then, thanks for the advice! It might mean I will air cool (probably a Coolermaster 212) for a while until I can get the water cooling in there, but no big deal as I'm only going water for the looks!

Cheers
Click to expand...

Stock hsf cooler is fine for stock clocks, until you get your water cooler.

No need to buy a better hsf unless you want to overclock the chip before you get your watercooling together.
 
Dave2150 said:
Stock hsf cooler is fine for stock clocks, until you get your water cooler.

No need to buy a better hsf unless you want to overclock the chip before you get your watercooling together.
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I've heard nothing but bad about the stock intel cooler? I was thinking £20 was a tiny upgrade price for a much better unit.

Overclocking will happen when the liquid cooling goes in :D Until then it'll stay with air.
 
FL630 said:
I've heard nothing but bad about the stock intel cooler? I was thinking £20 was a tiny upgrade price for a much better unit.

Overclocking will happen when the liquid cooling goes in :D Until then it'll stay with air.
Click to expand...

Yeh its up to you - I've built a few systems for friends with the 4790k, one was on a really right budget so we tried using the default HSF - completely fine temperatures. Idle was 35-38dc, load during BF4 (his main game) was 60-70 - this was in an Antec case with 2x120mm low rpm fans as intake and 1x120mm exhaust fan.

This was built during the Summer also.

Oh forgot to mention - I did replace the standard junk on the bottom of the heatsink with some mx2, probably makes a large difference over the standard stuff.
 
FL630 said:
I've heard nothing but bad about the stock intel cooler? I was thinking £20 was a tiny upgrade price for a much better unit.

Overclocking will happen when the liquid cooling goes in :D Until then it'll stay with air.
Click to expand...

Intel warranty your cpu for 3 years with the stock cooler at stock.

As long as it doesn't throttle (and it won't unless you have too high vcore from an early bios or a bad seat) does it really matter?
 
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