Gaming benchmarks for the different i5 Haswells?

[SteveGrabowski]

Does anyone know where one can find good gaming benchmarks for the various locked Core i5 Haswell/Haswell Refresh CPUs? I mean is there any difference between an i5 4430 and an i5 4690 (locked, not k) in anything but synthetic benchmarks? The only review I could find comparing different i5 Haswells used the IGP, but does anyone know where I could find good gaming benchmarks contrasting them when paired with strong GPUs instead? Tom's Hardware in their October CPUs article claims going above the i5 4430 is a waste of money unless you get the unlocked i5 4690k, but they don't provide any data showing why. Obviously I'd rather spend $18 less to get a 4460 instead of a 4590 or $43 less to get a 4460 instead of 4690 if none will bottleneck a GTX 970 and show no real difference in framerates nor frame times... e.g., a 2 FPS difference would be immaterial, but maybe a 5 FPS difference would matter though.

 

[escrow4]

I would never buy anything less than the highest clocked locked i5. Games love clock speed still and if its locked you can't up the clock speed. So i5 4670 would be the pick:

http://ark.intel.com/products/75047/Intel-Core-i5-4670-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz

I run non K 4770's in both my boxes. In game it typically hits 3.7GHz or 3.8GHz consistent, I've seen it hit 3.9GHz as the endstop too.

 

[toyota]

most people keep cpus for several years so whats the point in saving such a small amount of money? during the time you have your cpu, you will probably upgrade your gpu a few times plus you are already starting with a high end gpu so why be gimped on your next gpu upgrade? even the 4690 will hold back a 970 in Crysis 3 so if looking long term then I would go 4790k.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

It's not a small amount of money in the slightest, considering I'd have to throw away my H81 board and buy a Z97 board and an aftermarket heatsink and hope to win the silicon lottery. So I'm throwing an extra $125 for the board, $30 for the heatsink, plus the $50 all for the 4690k vs the 4460. I might as well buy a locked i5 now and buy a locked i5 Skylake in a couple of years for that cost and I'll probably be way better off.

 

[toyota]

the small amount was only in reference just to the 4430-4690 i5 cpus. if those are your only choices then go with the 4690. it turbos to 3.9 instead of 3.2 on the 4430.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

nm

 

[BSim500]

Tom's Hardware in their October CPUs article claims going above the i5 4430 is a waste of money unless you get the unlocked i5 4690k, but they don't provide any data showing why.

Depends on the game & benchmark. I have a "locked" i5-3570 running at 4.2GHz (probable equivalent of 3.8-4.0GHz Haswell), and I haven't found any game that "strains" it, even downclocking to 3.8Ghz (probable equivalent of 3.4-3.6GHz Haswell). Only real way of testing is to leave a CPU core usage logger running over the period of an hour of so whilst gaming. As for THG's recommendation of "either get the cheapest or go for a 'K' chip", this probably stems from the fact Intel removed the +400Mhz "limited OC" feature of Sandy/Ivy Bridge's from Haswell's. That's why my "3.8GHz max Turbo" vanilla 3570 can run at 4.2GHz (and a 3470 at 4.0GHz, etc) whereas you need a "K" chip for the same frequency on Haswell's. The non-K Haswell's have been "nerfed" somewhat in that respect compared to their previous gen equivalents. Very few (if any) games actually require a "K" chip for stable fps (though some single-thread limited games will actually run faster on top-end 3.7-3.8GHz i3-4360/4370's vs the slower 3.2-3.4GHz i5-44x0 low-end i5 range).

The latest console CPU's (6x usable Jaguar cores = the nearest Intel equivalent is the Avoton (8x Atom cores) or i3-4150) aren't exactly going to be "pushing" super-AI, etc for the next 6 years either, and in this era of "platform parity" and deliberate PC nerfing, I wouldn't go blowing it on 6 'real 'cores either expecting the PC version to be massively superior purely because there's more hardware to throw at it. As usual, the real limiter for PC games will continue to be developer attitude & budget. :whiste:

 

[Qwertilot]

Console ports do seem very safe whatever really I guess there is some PC specific stuff that I guess could end up getting limited by CPU performance. Mostly strategy games - all the Paradox things, Civ and the like.

Can't imagine the 65w ones being an issue. Actually I do wonder about even the 45w things. (35 even?!).

Really can't see why they shouldn't be able to comfortably cover the console ports, especially with the i7's potentially pushing so many threads.

Barely tested I believe. Some hints in an AT review here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7604/asrock-m8

 

[RussianSensation]

If you are thinking of going Skylake/Cannonlake and saving $, get the cheapest i5 and put the rest into a GPU. $230 His IceQ R9 290 is probably one of the best values now.
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=14-161-459

Or if you are tight on cash, R9 280 is a decent card for $160-170. But with R9 290 so cheap, I'd spend extra $60 because it will benefit the most from Mantle and with your stock i5 that would help you more than with R9 280. The move from R9 280 to R9 290 will give you a bigger FPS boost in 95% of games then moving from the cheapest i5 to any Intel CPU.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

It's not a small amount of money in the slightest, considering I'd have to throw away my H81 board and buy a Z97 board and an aftermarket heatsink and hope to win the silicon lottery. So I'm throwing an extra $125 for the board, $30 for the heatsink, plus the $50 all for the 4690k vs the 4460. I might as well buy a locked i5 now and buy a locked i5 Skylake in a couple of years for that cost and I'll probably be way better off.

It makes no sense to replace the board now anticipating compatibility with a future cpu. Could even buy an unlocked i5 cpu now, might be able to pull off a small overclock. Worst case intel fixed the non z oc it with devils canyon, but the chip will still have a much better resell value.

or, just stick with your pentium (thought you already had it?) and keep the cpu intensive settings more modest. At lower settings the biggest drops are usually the bits of non multithreaded code, and those will run perfectly on the pentium.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Why should I care about the upper limits of turbo frequency? On an i5 4690 I'd never hit 3.9 GHz when all four cores are loaded. If I cared about running single or dual threaded workloads at 3.9 GHz I'd never even buy a locked i5, since my G3258 @ 4.4 GHz would be a much better option that wouldn't cost me a cent more. Turbo boost sounds like Intel marketing; the whole point of frequency scaling is to go downward to save power when the CPU isn't being heavily utilized. If I'm running four cores at 100%, e.g., when the CPU is the bottleneck, is the CPU even going to be able to go into any turbo state?

 

[frozentundra123456]

There are other power saving options to downclock the cpu when at idle or light load. Turbo is always higher than the base frequency. I could not quickly find the all core turbo of the 4690 but it should be between the base clock of 3.5 and the single core turbo of 3.9. I would suspect something like 3.6 or 3.7. For instance, my i5 2320 with a base of 3ghz and a max turbo of 3.2 runs slightly over 3.1 ghz under load testing on all 4 cores. The only time where you will not turbo above base clock is if you are thermally limited, which is not likely to happen in a desktop at stock clocks.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

If you are thinking of going Skylake/Cannonlake and saving $, get the cheapest i5 and put the rest into a GPU. $230 His IceQ R9 290 is probably one of the best values now.
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=14-161-459

Or if you are tight on cash, R9 280 is a decent card for $160-170. But with R9 290 so cheap, I'd spend extra $60 because it will benefit the most from Mantle and with your stock i5 that would help you more than with R9 280. The move from R9 280 to R9 290 will give you a bigger FPS boost in 95% of games then moving from the cheapest i5 to any Intel CPU.

I'm really not looking at skylake and later unless there are just earth-shattering improvements; e.g., moving to hexacore at a similar pricepoint. Just using that as an example of a better use of the ~$200 extra it would cost me to go with an unlocked i5 4690k vs a locked i5 4460 or i5 4590, for example.

The 290 looks enticing at the prices it's at, but I'm a little worried about the power usage and temperatures. I live in a pretty hot climate and I'd hate to turn my computer into a spaceheater with a GPU designed to run at 95C. (or is that the 290x?) Also my power supply delivers 48A/576W on the 12V rail continuous, so that may be cutting it a bit close with an R9 290 since I run a lot of case fans and multiple mechanical drives. I can't believe AMD nerfed the R9 285 with 2GB RAM. Maybe the 285x will be better. Ideally I'd like to spend $250 on a GPU, but the GTX 970 seems pretty worth going over budget for. The i5 4690k doesn't.

 

[Yuriman]

It's not a small amount of money in the slightest, considering I'd have to throw away my H81 board and buy a Z97 board and an aftermarket heatsink and hope to win the silicon lottery. So I'm throwing an extra $125 for the board, $30 for the heatsink, plus the $50 all for the 4690k vs the 4460. I might as well buy a locked i5 now and buy a locked i5 Skylake in a couple of years for that cost and I'll probably be way better off.

There's no need for a Z97 board if you're getting a locked Haswell chip. The only advantage of a Z series chipset (compared with an H97, for instance) is overclocking.

Why should I care about the upper limits of turbo frequency? On an i5 4690 I'd never hit 3.9 GHz when all four cores are loaded. If I cared about running single or dual threaded workloads at 3.9 GHz I'd never even buy a locked i5, since my G3258 @ 4.4 GHz would be a much better option that wouldn't cost me a cent more. Turbo boost sounds like Intel marketing; the whole point of frequency scaling is to go downward to save power when the CPU isn't being heavily utilized. If I'm running four cores at 100%, e.g., when the CPU is the bottleneck, is the CPU even going to be able to go into any turbo state?

Not exactly. Turbo is really just maximum clockspeed. A CPU that has 25% higher clocks will deliver 25% better performance/framerates in CPU-bound scenarios, both single- and multi-threaded. Turbo allows Intel to sell CPUs that can deliver bursts of performance that exceed the cooling needs advertised, which is important to OEMs.

When encoding or gaming, your CPU will maintain highest turbo state on all 4 threads so long as it doesn't exceed Intel's power limitations (the TDP) advertised. Generally, your CPU will always be running at max turbo in a desktop computer as TDP ratings are plenty high.

EDIT: Personally, I'd stick with the H81 board and plop in your highest compatible locked Haswell. That'll give you the most bang for your buck, unless you really want some of the features in a higher-end board. Haswell chips often have less overclocking headroom than previous generations.

You basically have 3 tiers of choices:

1. H81 + lowest end Haswell i5
2. H81/H97 + highest end locked i5
3. Z97 + 4670K

IMO, the most value is in option 2, but none are bad choices.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Why not put an unlocked haswell in his current board?

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Why not put an unlocked haswell in his current board?

Is it realistic to get a significant overclock on a 4 core CPU with a voltage limit of 1.2V on a stock cooler? Or do I have to get really lucky? I mean I can get a lot out of my G3258 in that setup, but it's only dual core so probably puts out way less heat.

 

[Yuriman]

Is it realistic to get a significant overclock on a 4 core CPU with a voltage limit of 1.2V on a stock cooler? Or do I have to get really lucky? I mean I can get a lot out of my G3258 in that setup, but it's only dual core so probably puts out way less heat.

I imagine most unlocked Haswell i5's will overclock pretty similarly to Pentiums with the same voltage, so you'll be doubling your CPU power (plus AVX instructions). How much heat it puts out doesn't seem to have any relation to how far it'll overclock with limited voltage?

EDIT: I'm a bit confused. You're seemingly dismissing single-core performance with a quad (turbo argument), but then wondering if a quad core will be worth it with your current board because of less single-threaded performance? What are your goals with this upgrade?

 

[SteveGrabowski]

EDIT: I'm a bit confused. What are your goals with this upgrade? You're seemingly dismissing single-core performance with a quad (turbo argument), but then wondering if a quad core will be worth it with your current board because of less single-threaded performance?

My goal is not bottlenecking a GTX 970 on 1920x1080 for the lowest price, with the constraint that the CPU should be a quad core Haswell. I was dismissing the highest turbo on single/dual core because as far as I know, the newer dual core games like Bioshock Inifinite and Tomb Raider perform great on any i5 (or even a stock Pentium). Certainly a high turbo on a single core would be huge for emulation, e.g., PCSX2, but that's not much of a concern to me. But if the turbo boost is only 100-200 MHz when all cores are loaded, that seems hard to justify for the extra $40 or so. I'm not wondering if a quad core will be worth it at all; I'm wondering if it's like RAM, where there is almost no difference in gaming between normal DDR3 1600 and high end overclocked RAM, assuming you have enough. I'm wondering if just having a four core Haswell is enough to run games really nicely and if that extra horsepower from the high end i5's is more for overclocking enthusiasts who are concerned with synthetic benchmarks. No plans for ever doing SLI.

 

[Yuriman]

Makes sense.

It's hard to say, "enough" CPU is a constantly moving target. There are a few instances where even present i5's will be bottlenecked, though in a vast majority of cases you'll not notice a difference between either CPU. How long do you plan to keep this system? Things are not likely to change a lot in the next 12 months, but several years down the road you may be CPU limited by your purchase today, and want those extra clocks.

Going on Newegg prices:

$190 -> 3.2GHz (max turbo)
$200 -> 3.7GHz
$225 -> 3.9GHz
$230 -> unlocked chip

3.7GHz is 15% faster than 3.2, for a 5% increase in price. Let's say that you're arbitrarily CPU limited at 50fps with the low-end i5. A 15% framerate improvement would be 57.5fps. If you can get 4.3GHz (very likely) out of an unlocked i5, that's 35% faster than the $190 chip (67.5fps), for a 21% increase in cost. In the hardware world, even 1:1 scaling of performance with price is almost always worth paying for, and in this case you're getting *increasing* returns for spending more.

 

[Yuriman]

It gets even more convoluted when you figure in that you can buy a Xeon 1230V3 for ~$250, which is a 3.3/3.7GHz i7. Hyperthreading on Haswell chips delivers 0-50% extra performance (averaging ~30%, I believe). 25% more cost for up to 50% more performance over the $200 chip is tempting, though admittedly you'll be losing a bit of single-threaded performance over the unlocked i5 option.

EDIT: I don't think there's a wrong answer, but I wouldn't buy the $190 i5 when you can get 15% more for $10.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Makes sense.

It's hard to say, "enough" CPU is a constantly moving target. There are a few instances where even present i5's will be bottlenecked, though in a vast majority of cases you'll not notice a difference between either CPU. How long do you plan to keep this system? Things are not likely to change a lot in the next 12 months, but several years down the road you may be CPU limited by your purchase today, and want those extra clocks.

Going on Newegg prices:

$190 -> 3.2GHz (max turbo)
$200 -> 3.7GHz
$225 -> 3.9GHz
$230 -> unlocked chip

3.7GHz is 15% faster than 3.2, for a 5% increase in price. Let's say that you're arbitrarily CPU limited at 50fps with the low-end i5. A 15% framerate improvement would be 57.5fps. If you can get 4.3GHz (very likely) out of an unlocked i5, that's 35% faster than the $190 chip (67.5fps), for a 21% increase in cost. In the hardware world, even 1:1 scaling of performance with price is almost always worth paying for, and in this case you're getting *increasing* returns for spending more.

At those prices the i5-4590 is a no-brainer over the i5-4430, but I have seen i5-4460s selling in the $170 range from places like NCIX (though I wonder if they're tax free for shipping to Texas like newegg is). So a stable 4.3GHz clock is very likely on an i5-4690k on 1.2V with stock cooling? Never knew that. That certainly complicates things.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

It gets even more convoluted when you figure in that you can buy a Xeon 1230V3 for ~$250, which is a 3.3/3.7GHz i7. Hyperthreading on Haswell chips delivers 0-50% extra performance (averaging ~30%, I believe). 25% more cost for up to 50% more performance over the $200 chip is tempting, though admittedly you'll be losing a bit of single-threaded performance over the unlocked i5 option.

EDIT: I don't think there's a wrong answer, but I wouldn't buy the $190 i5 when you can get 15% more for $10.

Hmmm, a game programmer I talked to pegged the gain at about 15% if I'm lucky using HT and said it was nowhere close to actually having the physical cores instead of virtual ones. I was originally looking hard at the E3-1231v3 (clocked 100MHz higher for $6 extra) more for future proofing, but figured if it was getting to the point that 6-8 cores were necessary for quality gaming that it'd be better just to buy a hexa- or octacore since presumably they'd be moved out of the enthusiast lines and available for reasonable prices by then.

 

[Yuriman]

Take a look at Anand's 4790K review to get an idea of Haswell's scaling with hyperthreading:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k/3

Haswell is a wider core than Ivy Bridge and often gets a lot more from hyperthreading than previous chips.

This is a cherrypicked result. There's a clockspeed advantage there too, and in programs that don't utilize all of the cores, you'll see zero scaling, of course...

EDIT:

33% scaling there, at equal clocks.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Take a look at Anand's 4790K review to get an idea of Haswell's scaling with hyperthreading:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k/3

Haswell is a wider core than Ivy Bridge and often gets a lot more from hyperthreading than previous chips.

This is a cherrypicked result. There's a clockspeed advantage there too, and in programs that don't utilize all of the cores, you'll see zero scaling, of course...

EDIT:

33% scaling there, at equal clocks.

Is there anything approaching that in gaming though? I really don't want to spend $250 on a CPU and eat into my GPU budget unless the gain is really compelling. I don't do enough video editing to make even a $10 increase in price for 30% faster encodes to be worth it to me.... or even for 70% faster encodes.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

OK, read the review and it looks like almost no difference even in SLI with two GTX 770s between a stock i5-4690 and 4.7 GHz i7-4790k in BF4, which is supposed to be one of the most heavily threaded games out there. Seems like the Xeon E3-1231v3 is a waste of money for gaming. I wish they did that benchmark with lower i5s, though I wonder if the numbers for the 2.0GHz base / 3.0GHz turbo i7-4765T might be a good indication for the lower end i5s: