Saturday 4 October 2014

Intel Core i5 4690K

Intel Core i5 4690K

There is a common trend in pretty much all corners of the PC market, whether processors, graphics cards or motherboards. There’s a series with a super high-end component - seriously powerful, but probably very expensive. That’s the aspirational part. Then there’s the real low-end stuff, the components that share the same DNA but have been technologically hobbled to justify a far lower price. And then you have the middle siblings: they’ll generally have a good percentage of the power of the high-end, but with a generous drop in price.

These are the parts of interest to gainers, and the latest К-series i5 is a perfect example. It’s a powerful processor, with many of the qualities of the top-end Haswell Core i7 CPU, but with a few strategic omissions from its specs list. However, what has been removed to ensure a lower price doesn’t stop it from being the finest, best value gaming processor available.


The Core i5 4690K is the Devil’s Canyon refresh of the previous darling of the PC gaming community, the Core i5 4670K. It’s still a quad-core processor, and so missing the negligible gaming benefit of Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, but it has an extra 100MHz on top of the 3.4GHz base clock of the older i5 chip.

I know, big whoop, right? But being from the Devil’s Canyon range it has a few extra tricks up its sleeve, primarily the improved thermal goop between the chip and heatspreader atop it. Having extra thermal conductivity between the processor silicon and the metal lid the coolerstraps onto facilitates extra cooling and makes the Devil’s Canyon chips much better overclockers. They also have extra capacitors to smooth the flow of electricity and keep them stable.

The effect on the equivalent Core i7 isn’t particularly dramatic, but the difference it makes between the old i5 4670K and the new i5 4690K is huge. My previous-gen chip can barely push over 4.2GHz, but the 4690K is capable of stable performance up to 4.7GHz, and still does it with a lower platform power draw than a stock-clocked i7 4790K. That’s partly down to the extra power components, but the new thermal interface material has also dropped the chip’s operating temperature by around 10°C.

What does that mean in-game? Are we missing out by not having those extra HyperThreaded threads? Short answer: no. There is little appreciable difference between the eight threads of a Core i7 and the four threads of the Core iS processor. The extra single-threaded performance of the new Devil’s Canyon chip keeps pace with the higher-clocked i7 and proves that few game engines actually utilise the extra threads of an i7 CPU.

That’s true even if you’re not overclocking, and makes the iS 4690K the best gaming CPU currently available.