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Intel Upgrades Hardware

Intel Announces Devil's Canyon Core I7-4790K: 4GHz Base Clock, 4.4GHz Turbo 157

Posted by timothy from the let-the-bleeding-edge-do-the-bleeding dept.
MojoKid (1002251) writes "Last year, Intel launched two new processor families based on the Haswell and Ivy Bridge-E based Core i7 architecture. Both chips were just incremental updates over their predecessors. Haswell may have delivered impressive gains in mobile, but it failed to impress on the desktop where it was only slightly faster than the chip it replaced. Enthusiasts weren't terribly excited about either core but Intel is hoping its new Devil's Canyon CPU, which launches today, will change that. The new chip is the Core i7-4790K and it packs several new features that should appeal to the enthusiast and overclocking markets. First, Intel has changed the thermal interface material from the paste it used in the last generation over to a new Next Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material, or as Intel calls it, "NGPTIM." Moving Haswell's voltage regulator on-die proved to be a significant problem for overclockers since it caused dramatic heat buildup that was only exacerbated by higher clock speeds. Overclockers reported that removing Haswell's lid could boost clock speeds by several hundred MHz. The other tweak to the Haswell core is a great many additional capacitors, which have been integrated to smooth power delivery at higher currents. This new chip gives Haswell a nice lift. If the overclocking headroom delivers on top of that, enthusiasts might be able to hit 4.7-4.8GHz on standard cooling."
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Intel Announces Devil's Canyon Core I7-4790K: 4GHz Base Clock, 4.4GHz Turbo More

Intel Announces Devil's Canyon Core I7-4790K: 4GHz Base Clock, 4.4GHz Turbo

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  • why get this when Broadwell + new chipsets are coming soon?

    • Better yet, why get this *now* when you can wait til the price drops after the next iteration hits.

      • Re:why get this when Broadwell + new chipsets are (Score:5, Funny)

        by aliquis ( 678370 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @08:54AM (#47154641)

        Better yet, why get this *now* when you can wait til the price drops after the next iteration hits.

        If you wait ten years you can possibly get one from someone for free!!

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I'm waiting for the Core i7 4860DX/2 66GHz.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I'll only buy one if it comes in a case with a connected and operational 'TURBO' button

      • Re:why get this when Broadwell + new chipsets are (Score:5, Insightful)

        by kheldan ( 1460303 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @09:07AM (#47154775) Journal
        Some of you early-adopters may laugh at this, but this has been my upgrade strategy for decades now and from a bang-for-the-buck perspective it's extremely effective.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Not really. With my Difference Engine I only get around $0.10 per instruction since running the waterwheel ain't free.

        • Some of you early-adopters may laugh at this, but this has been my upgrade strategy for decades now and from a bang-for-the-buck perspective it's extremely effective.

          It's not just about the bang, either, but about the boon or the bane. If you wait for a while, you get to see whether something has massive fail built into it. When I buy based on hope I usually fail. When I buy based on what seems to have held up, I am usually happy. Leaving time for the 1.1 or 2.0 rev motherboard and some bios updates, and for some video driver updates, really improves system stability.

        • Yup. I usually buy somewhat trailing edge stuff myself.

          A friends aunt once asked what kind of computer she should buy, and she said "you're going to tell me to buy the most expensive computer around, aren't you?". To which I said "nope, I'm going to tell you to buy the cheapest machine you can find which can have its memory upgraded to at least double what entry level is, because you don't need anything faster, but more memory is always better".

          Several years later, she was still happily running the same m

          • I would say this was true a few years back, when memory was expensive and you generally never had enough to keep your OS from having to hit the swapfile/pagefile. Nowadays, memory is cheap and with "entry level" machines coming with 4GB, that's more than enough for most anyone who isn't going to push the machine hard. Someone else mentioned a SSD - that's probably the one performance upgrade that most anyone is going to notice, though if someone was concerned primarily about stability and longevity I woul

      • When Ivy Bridge came out, popular Sandy Bridge chips' prices went up and Intel also bumped Ivy Bridge chip prices up $10-20.

        When Haswell came out, many of the more popular Ivy Bridge chips went up $10-20 again.

        How many years has it been since the last time Intel made major price cut announcements after introducing newer higher-end models within a product line or even introducing a new product line? I do not remember reading about such announcements in over five years; instead of slashing prices, Intel simpl

        • I've been waiting years for the quad-core 65W Socket 775 CPUs to come down. The Q9550S was released in January of 2009 and still goes for over $200 [ebay.com]. Meanwhile the Core 2 Duo in the system I would upgrade is working fine; I just check ebay a couple times per year to see if I can pick up a quad core for cheap, but no.
          • Sold listings on ebay point to an average selling price of $125-150 for the Q9550S, some of which came with motherboards. The 45nm Yorkfield chips didn't seem to be very popular and were released quite late. Most folks went with Nehalem CPUs, so the low number of C2Qs from that era likely keep the prices high. The 65nm Q6600 was far more popular, easy to overclock, and can be had for cheap. I have a X38 based system I would like to upgrade myself, but with the high cost of CPUs and DDR2 memory, its likely t
            • But that Q6600 sucks down 105W / 155W Max, so I am loathe to put it in my home server (which runs all the time) - on top of the electrical costs, it would be a gamble on the PSU and cooling in that box... and what is a more annoying waste of time than an "almost stable" system?
              • Uh...go buy a Pentium G3420, or its successor, but not before the machine breaks down? For the money it costs, it seems to me you're solving a non-existent problem. (The new server boards with Atom C2750 are nice for multi-threaded workload in a similar performance range, with very little power, though. That depends on what you're running, of course. More expensive though, but you get ECC and proper server interfaces at least.)

          • You could get a low end motherboard and a Haswell Pentium G : dual core and dual thread, but the same multithreaded performance as that Q9550S roughly, for less power use.

          • Those chips have been long out of production, so you're either looking at a used chip or maybe the occasional new-old stock. The problem with trying to buy the high-end chips from older sockets is that there is a fairly good sized number of people after those chips who want to do an easy upgrade, or perhaps have a computer where the OEM Windows license is tied to the motherboard. This usually keeps the "top dog" at around $100-$200 for a surprising long time. A hint though, is to search for another model

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Because this is available now and Broadwell isn't?

      Also when Broadwell is released you know what? There will still be better processors released in the future! So better wait until the very best one is released ..

      Reason to get this is that 1) it exist now and 2) it's better than the last. Number two could actually be an argument to get what was released last if you think that provides a better value.

      Obviously if you already have a decent machine and can wait / have a processor from before the refresh then yo

    • Re:why get this when Broadwell + new chipsets are (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Salgat ( 1098063 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @08:59AM (#47154691)
      There are always new parts coming soon, you eventually have to pull the trigger and buy at some point.

      • If you know that a new model is coming out in the very near future, then it might be best to wait. Either you get the new model, or else you can sometimes pick up the old model for cheaper.

        • That is always true. The longer you wait, the cheaper it gets. If you wait forever, it costs nothing.

          If you need a job done now then get the cheapest equipment that can do the job. If you don't need it now then wait; the price of computer equipment only goes down.

  • More useful metrics? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StripedCow ( 776465 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @08:35AM (#47154459)

    Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?

    • Re:More useful metrics? (Score:4, Informative)

      by LoRdTAW ( 99712 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @08:40AM (#47154505)

      Because it doesn't have the wow-wee factor compared to raw clock speed numbers.

      • So the new cycles are: Tick/Tock/Wow, new capacitors.

        The article, amazingly poorly written by the way, mentions exactly zero changes to the chip itself.

        We are given "new caps, new glue, and you can overclock it for more performance".

        I'm off to ask my doctor to start me on Prozac...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe because FLOPS hasn't been such a great metric in more than a decade? On a modern architecture, you could estimate FLOPS as some constant times the clock speed, but then you end up with not all operations taking the same number of clock cycles. Or then you have SIMD to consider. Or what if you're interested in a square root function, do you need full precision or some approximation is okay? And heck, that's coming from someone that actually cares about FLOPS... most day to day applications have oth

    • For several reasons: FLOPS is a metric that depends on the algorithm used as well as on the system load. The system load could be minimized by running the benchmark on a bare-bone system multiple times and then averaging the results, but you still get serious variations. A FLOPS benchmark also depends on the RAM-speed and the amount of memory channels on the CPU chip if the benchmark is memory-hungry. Also, are you interested in running a large (parallel) computation over several days or a gazillion of sho

    • Re:More useful metrics? (Score:5, Informative)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @09:08AM (#47154783) Journal

      Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?

      Because the target market for this thing doesn't consider that a useful metric, and never has.

      For some years now (at least back to the P4 era, if memory serves), Intel has always offered the mad-crazy-overclocker-must-go-faster-edition CPU at the top of their (desktop, sorry Xeon buyers!) price list, usually ~$1,000. This part is always an astonishingly poor value, unless what you want is the fastest x86 money can buy. Most of them go to gamer e-peen setups, they may sell some to compute customers who have some pathologically hard-to-parallelize problem and thus need the fastest single threaded performance they can get, rather than more cores with lower performance per thread but far lower cost.

      If you are actually shopping for CPUs, you probably want something like CPUboss [cpuboss.com], or CPUbenchmark [cpubenchmark.net] which allows you to do fairly easy comparisons of performance/price (albeit for performance as measured by one or more general benchmarks, if your workload is somewhat atypical, your mileage may vary).

      • For some years now (at least back to the P4 era, if memory serves), Intel has always offered the mad-crazy-overclocker-must-go-faster-edition CPU at the top of their (desktop, sorry Xeon buyers!) price list, usually ~$1,000. This part is always an astonishingly poor value, unless what you want is the fastest x86 money can buy. Most of them go to gamer e-peen setups, they may sell some to compute customers who have some pathologically hard-to-parallelize problem and thus need the fastest single threaded perf

        • Can you define what you mean by 'a lot' of compiling? We have some machines where I regularly build LLVM and the FreeBSD base system. They're 32-core with 256GB of RAM, and on them most builds are nice and fast, although it still takes close to two hours to do a universe build (all kernel configs, userland for all supported architectures - the 'quick' sanity test that you haven't broken anything). They're similar specs to the 'beefy' machines in the FreeBSD cluster, which take around 24 hours to build a

    • Re:More useful metrics? (Score:4, Informative)

      by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @09:57AM (#47155331) Homepage

      Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?

      Because most people don't care about these things anymore. Take this from TFS:

      Haswell may have delivered impressive gains in mobile, but it failed to impress on the desktop where it was only slightly faster than the chip it replaced.

      In reality, Haswell had double the FLOPs thanks to the new FMA instructions, near double the integer throughput thanks to AVX2, and a significant boost to multithreaded code thanks to TSX.

      In practice, people saw maybe a 10% speedup in what they actually do. A flops/$ metric would significantly inflate the actual value people would see from these CPUs.

      The thing is, these measurements are either synthetic (who has code consisting of nothing but FMA?), hard and uncommon to use (Integer SIMD is rare and AVX2 has a confusing idea of "lanes" that splits some 256-bit ops into two 128-bit ones), or not on all CPUs (TSX is disabled on their unlocked K line for some reason).

      • "The thing is, these measurements are either synthetic (who has code consisting of nothing but FMA?), hard and uncommon to use (Integer SIMD is rare and AVX2 has a confusing idea of "lanes" that splits some 256-bit ops into two 128-bit ones), or not on all CPUs (TSX is disabled on their unlocked K line for some reason)."

        Except to the people buying top-bin parts by the thousands that really do need all of these obscure ops.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Grog6 ( 85859 )

        This exactly.

        Unless a piece of software takes advantage of the "new" features, it doesn't help.

        The slow adoption of the MMX stuff is a good example; a developer I know rewrote a very complicated piece of code to take full advantage of SSE2 and multithreading, and took a 45 minute computation down to 8 minutes.

        Being an old assembler guy, that really amazed me; kinda like adding a few lines of inline assembler to a C routine, and watching it go zoom.

        Adding cores helps, but the FSB speed is still the main thin

    • Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?

      Amen, brother. For example, let's take a Pentium 4, 3.0GHz [cpubenchmark.net] and a Core i7, 3.5GHz [cpubenchmark.net]. At the same TDP (and all cores utilized), the Core i7 is 28x more powerful than the P4. Even if we compensate the clockspeed to be equal (downclock the i7 to 3GHz), it clearly shows that something like "GHz" is today completely useless for comparing CPUs.

    • Or floating point operations / watt?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      If you know about those things then you know where tt get that info, if you don't know about those thing that will just makes someone eyes glaze over.
      So, give a metric with the widest appeal.

  • Still no consumer-level octo-core? I'll continue to stick with my Q9450 then. I'm not willing to spend thousands on a Xeon.

    Before you ask, I do video work as a hobby. I often utilize all four of my cores at 100% capacity for 6+ hours on end when performing filtering and encoding. No, I am not interested in the AMD FX and their half-cores.

    Get it together, Intel. I will buy as soon as you sell.

    • Re:Meh. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @09:05AM (#47154747)

      Lol, you do realize an i5-5370 is roughly twice as fast at video encoding compared to your old Q9450, right? Just because they haven't double the number of cores doesn't mean they haven't improved performance significantly in the consumer space.

    • Still no consumer-level octo-core? I'll continue to stick with my Q9450 then. I'm not willing to spend thousands on a Xeon.

      You don't need to spend thousands - my last build was a little SOHO Xen server using a Xeon 2620 [amazon.com] which is a six-core with hyperthreading. Much to my surprise, HP's benchmarks showed a 30% performance improvement under Xen with hyperthreading in use, so that's 7.8 cores worth, which is pretty good for $400. I used a single-processor mobo [amazon.com], but dual-sockets are available. It's not a lin

    • Haswell-E coming out later this year will have 6 or 8 cores (source [techpowerup.com]).

    • I recently upgraded my Q9650 to a Haswell i7 4770.

      I loved my Q9650. It performed stably and admirably and stayed relevant for a very long time (and is still relevant today), but my 4770 eats its lunch in ways I never imagined when buying it.

      I write a lot of memory-intensive multi-core one-off software, and in some workloads my 4770 is close to twice as fast.

      Anecdotal, and YMMV on real-world workloads, but the generations after Nehalem really are worth the money if you're lifting heavy weight with your

    • You might try a newer processor. The latest chips from Intel are considerably faster than the Core 2 chips even if they haven't increased the core count and the clock speeds are more or less the same. Even in the Core i5 line, I would estimate that clock for clock, a fourth gen i5 is 40-50% faster than a first generation Core i5. That's of course, assuming the encoding times are problem for you - if you start it before going to bed and it's done by the time you wake up then it may not matter :)

  • Hasn't this tired car analogy run it's course by now? Every time I hear "Turbo!" I think of this guy. [smosh.com] JFC.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kardos ( 1348077 )

      It's not a car analogy any longer. If you find a car with tubro, it's using a CPU analogy.

    • Hasn't this tired car analogy run it's course by now? Every time I hear "Turbo!" I think of this guy. JFC.

      It isn't a car analogy. It WAS... back in the late 80s.

      IBM-compatible PC clones came out with a switch in the back to boost the clock speed higher than the "official" IBM speed. This was called "turbo" even though, in practice, people set it there and left it there. Think of it as an early form of overclocking.

      Although, to be fair, Intel's CPU "turbo" is probably a bit more of a car analogy because it's a temporary speed boost, not a permanent one.

      • Although, to be fair, Intel's CPU "turbo" is probably a bit more of a car analogy because it's a temporary speed boost, not a permanent one.

        For Ivy Bridge chips with decent cooling, it's basically permanent. Every Ivy Bridge chip has the base clock speed (the number on the box), the "Turbo" speed (which is available for a single core only), and the "multi-core turbo" that isn't advertised very well, but sites like CPUBenchmark will give you the details.

        For example, I have an E5-2630 (yes, it's a Xeon, but there are fairly equivalent desktop chips) with a base clock of 2.6GHz, a single-core turbo of 3.1GHz, and a multi-core turbo of 2.9GHz. Si

        • Since you brought it up: if you were building a heavy-use machine for code development today, would you go with 6-or-more-core Xeon, or a newer Haswell 4-core chip and board?

          Typically running a code editor, web browser, web / database server, video, and possibly file copies at the same time. Although the web and database severs are almost always single-user at any given time.

          The thing is, it has to have good video capabilities as well as decent number-crunching. A pure server setup would not be approp

          • Since you brought it up: if you were building a heavy-use machine for code development today, would you go with 6-or-more-core Xeon, or a newer Haswell 4-core chip and board?

            To me, Xeon vs. desktop chip comes down to how much memory you are going to want. Trusting 32GB or more to not have a random memory error isn't something I want to do, so I went with a Xeon and ECC. In addition, if you want more than 32GB, that means an LGA2011 socket for Intel...none of their other sockets have chipsets that can handle more. If you go LGA2011, then your best bet is a workstation board, since you could eventually put a Xeon and 256GB of RAM on it, but could start with a desktop CPU and w

            • Your use case sounds like it doesn't really need the extra CPU threads, but does need disk speed. For that, I say SSD for your boot plus a real RAID controller (preferably with battery backup) with spinning disks for bulk storage and lots of RAM for cache. The same system with the E5-2630 v2 has 64GB of RAM, a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO and five 2TB WD Red drives in RAID-5 connected to an Adaptec 6805 with battery backup. Reads and writes to the SSD and the array are at similar speeds (between 400MB/sec and 600MB/sec), and more than one app hitting the disk at the same time doesn't make things slow to a crawl.

              I appreciate the advice, but I've been building systems a long time. I was just curious what you thought about processor choices for that use-case.

              The ECC is an angle I hadn't thought of, though. That does makes sense. As for the rest, because I'm probably going with OS X the selection of boards is limited, and so are the GPUs. They're good, don't get me wrong. But there aren't that many of them that work well.

              And I don't use Samsung drives if I can help it. I know Apple uses them a lot, but they aren

              • And I don't use Samsung drives if I can help it. I know Apple uses them a lot, but they aren't really celebrated for their high performance.

                For spinning disks, maybe not, but for SSDs, Samsung is king, especially their new M.2 XP941 model with 4 PCIe lanes.

        • By the way: OP says the i7-4790 was announced today but it has been for sale on Newegg for at least a week.

  • Not terribly expensive if this is accurate.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/... [newegg.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 )
      Yeah, this isn't Haswell-E just yet. As far as I know, that will build upon Devil's Canyon and go up to 8 cores on a single chip, with HyperThreading of course. It should also come with a new platform, chipset and socket to support DDR4 and SATAe. Personally, that's the jump I'm really looking forward to: Intel's first 8-core desktop chip.

      • Personally, that's the jump I'm really looking forward to: Intel's first 8-core desktop chip.

        With Google's stats on how often ECC in their servers correct errors, I'm not sure why anyone is anxious for an 8-core chip that can't use ECC memory.

        My guess is that if you need 8 cores, you need more memory, and that means you are more likely to have errors. That plus the fact that the only current Intel desktop chipset supports more than 32GB of RAM has an LGA2011 socket is why I went with a Xeon...if I'm going to pay for a more expensive motherboard and processor, I might as well pay just a little more

  • LOL, I predict all sorts of batshit crazy protests over that one ... ZOMG, teh Intel are teh Satanists.

  • I propose they refer to their Next Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material as 'NexGen Poly TIM'.

  • A lot of us really do need powerhouse laptops and I really could use a 4ghz-5ghz boosted quad i7 laptop. I really hope we get some real performance in the upper end soon.

  • Possibly more interesting (Score:3)

    by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @09:19AM (#47154885)

    Also announced were an i5 and a Pentium-branded Devil's Canyon processors. All three have the same TIM upgrade and overclocking focus. The i5-4690K is similar to the i7-4690K, dropping hyperthreading, a bit of cache and some stock clock, but for $100 cheaper ($242 instead of $339, if reports are accurate).

    The really interesting one is the Pentium G3258. Two cores, no hyperthreading, but with an unlocked multiplier, for $72. If you care more about single-threaded performance than multi-threaded, this might be a very cool thing. Buy one, and a good aftermarket cooler, and overclock it into the 4GHz range. If your load is mainly single-threaded, like far too many games are, that can give you the same performance but be much, much cheaper.

  • Quantum computing is just around the corner. -_-
  • Thanks Intel for shafting your early adopters and denying that there is a problem with the IHS assembly process for IvyBridge and Haswell. The TIM that they used is actually quite good, it's just the spacing inconsistency between the die and IHS during manufacturing that is the issue.

  • I better pry my chip out right after I finish this!

    BTW, my 2600k will overclock to 4.2GHz on air, but I don't do it--because that speed difference is so incremental, and so is Intel's progress.

    The problem is: many program usually are largely single threaded, such as CAD and meshing operations for many other 3D applications.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by imashination ( 840740 )
      3D Animator here. I made the same mistake as you, thinking my 2.8GHz i7 920 (overclocked to 3.7GHz) would be as fast a current 3.7GHz i7. Each new generation of i7 has been ~5% faster clock for clock. For example my new i7 laptop at 2.6GHz is roughly the same speed as my desktop at 3.7GHz in both single and multi threaded tasks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      You don't really understand how chips work or what power means, do you?

  • In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Torp ( 199297 ) on Tuesday June 03, 2014 @10:09AM (#47155493)

    My 2 year old Ivy Bridge Core i7 is fast enough, and will be fast enough for the foreseeable future with no overclocking. Neither Intel nor AMD will get any money from me for at least 3 more years ;)
    Last time an overclock was meaningful for me was when I had a Pentium 1 at 233 Mhz. The bus was 66 Mhz, and that was the ram speed as well. Upping it to 250 Mhz on a 100 Mhz bus (remember back when multipliers went in 0.5 steps?) speed greatly improved the overall responsiveness of the system.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jandrese ( 485 )
      The sad thing is that my positively ancient Core2Duo 2.4Ghz is still plenty fast for most tasks these days. This isn't the old days where upgrading the CPU every couple of years gave noticeable improvements to the OS and generic applications like word processors and web browsers. Worse, application developers have been focusing on improving speed (especially on browsers) instead of just jamming in more features. Its getting harder and harder to find motivation to upgrade. We really need some CPU depend

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Torp ( 199297 )

        Yeah, my needs are already above the norm. I could do with your core 2 duo for about 90% of my stuff. Heck, I could do with my 2009 macbook white for about 90% of my stuff.

  • One of the two new "features" is basically TIM that doesn't suck so much?

    A) The first thing than an OC does is wipe whatever the fsck is on there off.
    B) Quality stuff is literally 4$ a tube, and per application is measured in pocket change. Is that significant to the cost of a high end CPU?
    C) Many new components like aftermarket HS and water blocks now come with quality TIM, and not just silicone sludge.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Torp ( 199297 )

      They're talking about the *other* layer of TIM, between the metal capsule that you wipe off and the actual CPU core. Can't access it without a razor blade.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hodr ( 219920 )

      You may be confused. They aren't referring to the white silicone paste or the sticky pad that is normally use to attach the heat spreader (top of the CPU you normally see) to the OEM heatsink/fan.

      They are talking about the material used to attach the heat spreader to the actual CPU core. Unless you are prying the metal cap off the top of the CPU you aren't replacing this existing TIM with your $4 arctic silver compound.

      • Ah. Obviously didn't read the article.

        Though I remember people lapping CPU's back in the day, though again that was more to level and ensure a good mating with the HS. Thought I have seen some that got the metal pretty thin as well almost exposing the core.

        However the whole conversation is a bit moot. By Intel "targeting" the OC you pretty much eliminate the purpose for doing so in the first place. The whole idea was you take a cheap chip, and OC it to something much better. Now the chips you can OC are mor

  • I think the most significant thing is that they managed to break the 4GHz barrier. Is this a one off, or did they finally come up with the technology required to make >4GHz chips a standard thing from now on?

  • Sounds like a really cool product. It's a pity intel has over-segmented their product line and I can't get this chip with ECC. That would be cool. In fact, ECC should some day become a standard feature. But that's just wishful thinking.

  • For a person owning a single workstation power consumptions means little.

    Even if you are an intel fanboi, look at the single core performance, in a comparable test.
    http://www.tomshardware.com/ch... [tomshardware.com]

    I don't thing the newer chips will be much faster at multi-core raytracing either.

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