Intel 4670K i5 Haswell Review & Overclocking

Intel 4670K i5 Haswell Review & Overclocking

Conclusion

When we first got wind of the Core i5-4670K we wondered, as we are sure you did, as to whether Intel have produced a successor for the vastly popular and powerful Core i5-2500K.

Unquestionably they have.

The Core i5-4670K is a pocket rocket. Stock performance is good, but it’s the ease of the overclocking that really shone. Without the Hyper-Threading you have some more thermal headroom and this meant that we could squeeze a very impressive 4.8GHz out of our sample. We’re not suggesting that all Core i5-4670K’s will achieve this high clock speed, but equally it’s good to know that it’s possible if you get the right one.

We knew going in to our testing that the CPU Benchmarks would favour the Core i7-4770K more simply due to it’s Hyper-Threading, and certainly the Core i5-4670K hardly set the world alight, yet neither did it have to sit in the corner in disgrace either. With our 4.8GHz overclock in place it regularly matched a stock i7-4770K. But nobody buys a CPU just to run calculation tests on it. Or at least nobody who demands intense calculations and transcoding will buy a Core i5.

What was consistently jaw-dropping was the real world performance of the Core i5-4670K. PC Mark gave a similar score with our i5-4670K as we’ve seen from our i7-4770K. We don’t just mean that the overclock was impressive either, but the stock performance was always eye-opening.

Games, however, are where the Core i5-4670K really shines. At lower resolutions (1024 or 1280) you’ll get higher average frame-rates or 3D Mark results with the range-topping i7-4770K, but as soon as you move to a resolution that you’ll actually use, 1080P, then the difference between a stock Core i5-4670K and a 4.9GHz i7-4770K all but disappear. It’s incredible.

We think this is the best CPU on the market at the moment when you compare the cost and the performance that you obtain. It’s really easy to overclock, capable enough in video rendering or other CPU intensive tasks to not be frustrating, and in the daily tasks that we actually use our systems for, browsing, calendars, light image editing and gaming, it’s an absolute beast and easily a match for anything you can put up against it.

We’ve waited a long time for a processor to finally dethrone the Core i5-2500K as the best bang-for-buck CPU around, and with the Core i5-4670K we finally have it. The King is dead, long live the King.

       

Thanks to Intel for supplying the i5-4670K for review. Discuss your thoughts in the OC3D Forums.