Intel Core i5-4670K Pro Reviews

The Intel Core i5-4670K performed good enough for daily tasks, games, pi calculations, CPU benchmarks, and even encoding tests. It is clearly the best choice in its price range but is not worth upgrading to from a Core i5-3570K. It is the best choice for gamers as only few games take advantage of Hyper-Threading, and those that do don't exhibit a large enough performance boost to make the i7 worthwhile. It is important to mention that its integrated GPU is great for watching movies and playing less demanding games like League of Legends. Its biggest disadvantage is not only the temperature but also its low overclocking potential. That said, if you find a good chip, it should still overclock to around 4.5 to 4.7 GHz, which is more than enough for most users, but we would love to see Haswell overclock higher.

Intel hopes the Core i5-4670K Haswell chip is chosen by PC enthusiasts as the base for a quality mainstream build. Most of the signs are positive, as the £190 processor is fast, energy efficient and has much-improved integrated graphics over the last generation. Yet with the vast majority of gamers and enthusiasts electing to run with a discrete video card and therefore negate any meaningful benefits from the integrated graphics, we believe that anyone with a broadly equivalent Intel Sandy Bridge 2500K or Ivy Bridge 3570K chip will not receive a reasonable boost in performance. This fact is particularly important to understand because switching out to the latest Haswell architecture also requires investment in a new motherboard. Without contradicting the above statements, readers who are investigating a brand-new PC build will find the Core i5-4670K to be a fine processor in its own right, and Intel's dominance in this portion of the CPU market means it's the only real choice when spending around £200. Our advice regarding the Intel Core i5-4670K actually reduces down rather simply: it's certainly worth considering for a fresh PC build but the minor enthusiast-orientated improvements aren't nearly enough to recommend an immediate upgrade for any reader with a quality CPU from the last two years.

All of which leaves us with Haswell's final innovation - improved battery life - but this is a desktop chip, so that doesn't apply. Better power consumption is always a good thing, but the savings are tiny for grid-connected appliances. There you have it. The new Intel Core i5-4670K enters the CPU charts as our new favourite all-round gaming CPU. And it's also a huge disappointment. So it goes.

I’m a fan of Haswell, even on the desktop. The performance gains over Ivy Bridge depend on workload, but in general you’re looking at low single digits to just under 20%. We saw great behavior in many of our FP heavy benchmarks as well as our Visual Studio compile test. If you’re upgrading from Sandy Bridge you can expect to see an average improvement just under 20%, while coming from an even older platform like Nehalem will yield closer to a 40% increase in performance at the same clocks. As always, annual upgrades are tough to justify although Haswell may be able to accomplish that in mobile. Even on the desktop, idle power reductions are apparent both at the CPU level and at the platform level. Intel focused on reducing CPU power, and it seems like Intel's motherboard partners did the same as well. Under load Haswell can draw more power than Ivy Bridge but it typically makes up for it with better performance. Overclockers may be disappointed at the fact that Haswell is really no more of an overclocker (on air) compared to Ivy Bridge. Given the more mobile focused nature of design, and an increased focus on eliminating wasted power, I don’t know that we’ll ever see a return to the heyday of overclocking.

A worthy successor to the Core i5-3570K that is set to be just as popular

While notebook and high end tablet users will likely benefit from the lion’s share of Haswell’s improvements, the desktop market certainly hasn’t been left out in the cold. The seemingly minor architectural changes have allowed the i7 4770K and i5 4670K to become the CPUs of choice for gaming and general computing scenarios. While neither offers any tangible performance improvements over comparable Ivy Bridge processors, they will provide a highly efficient heart for tomorrow’s computing needs while also satisfying the demands of overclockers.