14 DAY TRIAL // Some people still thought at one point that Intel would wait until July before it shipped the Devil's Canyon series of unlocked Haswell refresh chips, but the corporation has gone ahead and unleashed them at Computex 2014.
We can safely say that the information uncovered previously, through leaks and other premature revelations, has been confirmed.
There are two processors in the collection for now, both of which have four cores. One of them, thanks to Hyper-Threading technology, even appears as eight logical CPUs in Windows. That's a common feature of high-end and even most mid-range Intel chips really.
So what's so special about these processors that Intel decided to hold off on their unveiling when it unleashed the rest of the Haswell refresh line back in April?
The K suffix is the key, as it stands for the unlocked multiplier. You see, while there is some clock tweaking possible on some of the other Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, it's the unlocked chips that will make overclockers' dreams come true.
Or make them fry the chips, motherboards or both in their attempts to make said dreams come true. It boils down to how careful they are to keep the liquid nitrogen flowing (or liquid helium, since few other substances are cool enough to keep heat at bay).
Core i7-4790K is the flagship, obviously, with an 8 MB L3 cache memory, Intel HD 4600 integrated graphics, dual-channel DDR memory support, and base clock speed of 4 GHz and the ability to jump to 4.4 GHz in a pinch, without user assistance.
That's the beauty of Turbo Boost technology, you see. When the PC is asked to run something particularly strenuous, the dynamic overclocking kicks in.
Of course, this is a chip made for user-controlled, manual overclocking. Record-setting, if you like to look at it that way.
And there are very, very few programs that can actually demand more than 4 GHz, if they even need that at any given time (unless you launch more things at once or something). So the Turbo Boost technology will probably be underutilized by systems powered by this particular chip.
Anyway, the second chip in the series is the Core i5-4690K, with 3.5 GHz/3.9 GHz performance. It lacks Hyper-Threading, so no virtual 8-CPU benefits here. Not that four cores aren't already enough.
Intel expects buyers to hand over $350 / €350 for the Core i7-4790K, and $250 / €250 for the Core i5-4690K. Shipments will begin by June 25.