The Quad vs. Hex Showdown: Core i7-4790K vs. 5820K in Games [TBG]

[Blín D'ñero]

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The question of the effect of core count on games is one we have looked at many times before in our Gamer's Bench, but so far with a focus on dual-cores, quad-cores, and Hyperthreaded virtual cores. We've previously found that quad-cores offer significant advantages over dual-cores, and that Hyperthreading can help in certain games, especially on dual-core processors. These results begged an obvious question: what if you have more than six cores, along with Hyperthreading? Would that be the ultimate gaming setup? Well, we're here to answer that question, as we pit our six-core i7-5820K processor against an i7-4790K.

It's an interesting matchup in more than one way. Both chips are based on the Haswell microarchitecture (the 5820K is technically "Haswell-E"), meaning each of their cores is essentially identical. The only major difference between the two designs is that the 5820K has 2.5MB of cache per core, while the 4790K has 2MB of cache per core. Both feature Hyperthreading, which brings the 5820K up to 12 total logical cores and the 4790K up to 8 cores. That being said, the 4790K is clocked at 4.0 GHz out of the box, with Turboboost to 4.4GHz, while the 5820K is clocked at 3.3GHz with Turboboost to 3.7GHz. To even the playing field, we overclocked both processors to 4.4GHz for our benchmark tests.

Of course, there's one other major difference between the two processors, and that is the platform. The 4790K uses the Z97 platform, while the 5820K uses the X99 platform, the latter which features a more robust quad-channel DDR4-based memory architecture. One would think that the added memory bandwidth, in combination with the extra cache, should be enough to push the 5820K ahead of the 4790K in all gaming scenarios, even where extra cores aren't helpful. We shall soon see if that proves to be true!

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