My 4790K is here and it can boot to desktop at 4.6GHz with 1.25V!

When the doorbell rang in the morning of Saturday, the 5th of July, I knew what I had hoped for had come true. I ordered the Core i7 4790K CPU on the previous evening from Amazon and the CPU arrived before noon. I had already dug up the toolset, the Arctic Cooling MX-5 thermal paste and the box of the old CPU by this time, and was ready to replace the CPU and test it as soon as possible.

But first things first. Photo-shoot!

		Devil’s Canyon is here VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

 

The batch number of this particular CPU is L418C209.

• L means it is made in Malaysia.

• 4 means it is made in the year 2014. (You would expect all the Decil's Canyon chips to be made in 2014, but that's not the case. Some of them had been made as early as mid 2013. Seems like Intel had been binning the chips for a year to get to this point.)

• 18 means it is made in the 14th week.

• And the rest of it means the lot number.

Then it was time to install the CPU. The top cover and the two side panels of the case were removed quickly. While removing the panel behind the motherboard, a thumbscrew fell into the case and it could not be found ever again!!! It was like finding a needle in the haystack, with all the cables behind the motherboard tray. If I was a little bit more patient, I probably could have found it but I had a brand new CPU right next to me begging to be overclocked!! What did you expect? But I did a quick glance to see if there were any kind of short circuiting.

As the double sided tape that was holding the back-plate of the CPU cooler is no longer present in my Antec Kuhler 620 cooler, I knew that installation of it would be an irritable experience. Thus I tried a new trick this time. Instead of removing the whole mounting cage, I decided to just loosen it and sneak the CPUs in and out. Plus, I decided to leave the radiator mounted on the case while doing all this. The water block could be easily removed but the retention lever of the CPU could not be pulled to take off the CPU as the frame of the mounting cage was blocking its motion. If seemed as if it was impossible to remove the CPU without removing the mounting cage.

Getting ready to welcome the 4790K

Yesterday I ordered my Core i7 4790K CPU. It should arrive within today. Amazon says that they have already shipped the item. Hopefully it will arrive before nightfall. 

In the mean time, I decided to update the firmware of my Maximus VI Hero motherboard. It already had a version of firmware that supported Devil's Canyon CPUs - version 1402. But as it was a beta firmware, and as there was a newer non-beta firmware available - version 1505, there was no reason to stick to what the board currently had.

Updating firmware on Asus boards - even in the year 2014 - is a tedious task. The actual updating process is quite simple. But the CMOS settings will be lost forever with it. If one knew how hard it is to overclock Haswell CPUs, these custom CMOS settings can be invaluable. Hence, they need to be saved somewhere, so that one can get back to those settings after updating the firmware. There indeed is a feature built into Asus UEFI, where the CMOS settings can be saved to a USB flash drive. This feature doesn't really work as expected. Both versions of the firmware - the one original settings are from and the one the old settings are loaded on to - have to be same. This makes it completely useless to an individual. The real purpose of this feature could be to share settings at an overclocking event.

Ordered the Devil of a 4790K

I managed to successfully sell the old Core i7 4770K via Rakuten Auctions. I have a week to send the CPU to its new owner, but before that I had to buy a new 4790K CPU.

I waited for CPU + motherboard combo deals for weeks. Like I mentioned in the earlier post, Sofmap is selling CPU + motherboard combo for with a JPY5000 discount, but they are not selling any motherboard that I want to buy. If I was going to get a motherboard as well, I wanted it to be a Micro ATX motherboard, which is imperative to my PC shrinking project. As there weren’t any appealing online deals, I decide to finally buy just the CPU and ordered the 4790K in the evening from Amazon. I paid extra for the instant delivery - it's a small sum - so that I could get it one Saturday and play with it over the weekend.

I'm still not sure that I would be getting a good chip. If the past is any indication, it would be a crappy overclocker - I would probably get 4.6GHz at 1.3V. It'll be still better than my old chip and probably will run cooler and use less power.