Ever thought of an ultra-small, yet fully overclockable, high speed desktop PC squeezed inside the compact Mini-ITX platform? A combination of Intel’s Core i7-4790X and Gigabyte GA-Z97N board could give you that, just watch the Mini-ITX size and power limits.

First, with its jacked up CPU and GPU core speeds, the “Devil’s Canyon” 4 GHz four-core Haswell does have enough muscle to drive a home-theatre UHD 3840×2160 TV platform, in everything minus the 3D games. The latter point would, of course, have to wait for some substantial GPU architecture refresh within Intel, something not likely until Skylake platform a year and half from now.

System overview

A UHD home theatre PC with OC capability may not be the first thing that comes to one’s mind when matching the desired features, however Taiwan vendors did create the solution anyway. One of the best such boards available is the GA-Z97N Gaming from Gigabyte, which was  matched for testingwith the i7-4790X. The other key components used were a pair of Kingston 4 GB HyperX DDR3-2400 DIMMs, and GELID SlimHero 4-heat pipe heat sink fan unit. As you will see, the Kingstons did manage to even improve on the default latency while cutting 3% of the default voltage required, while GELID SlimHero nicely covers both the VRM and DIMM parts for a bit of extra airflow to avoid need for a separate system fan altogether.

Back to the motherboard: knowing that overclocking the 4 GHz Haswell to somewhere around 4.5 GHz before Turbo, plus running the memory at highspeed, and still providing for an optional PCIe v3 GPU, was already a tall order for even a mATX mobo, I was pleasantly surprised that Gigabyte managed to squeeze far more into it.

A combination of (now Qualcomm) KillerNIC Gigabit Ethernet and PCIe WiFi, 4 SATA plus 1 eSATA, all 6 Gbps, Realtek1150 audio codes, and, yes, still having one PS/2 keyboard or mouse connector besides the USB, just in case. The video interface portion didn’t disappoint either,

with DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort – but no Thunderbolt, though. And then, you would notice the 24+8 power connectors, the full complement needed for a decent OC gaming platform feeding a high end GPU, all in a Mini-ATX format.

For this first look, I put up the system to run in the open, before finding a truly good Mini-ATX casing and PSU that would do it justice – not an easy task knowing this compact format’s limitations. The setup, including CPU, HSF and memory, took all of ten minutes, and, this being a Mini-ATX board, it was darn easy to handle the connectors and cables.

Even though the default BIOS was dated April – and I would try to keep it as long as I can, since it keeps the TSX transaction memory extensions turned on, unlike the versions from June onwards – it fully supported the i7-4790X out of the box, including the 4 GHz default frequency and 4.4 GHz Turbo. The CPU voltage was a little high in my mind, going at 1.35 V, so, as incrementally overclocking it, I managed to find a sweet spot of 4.6 GHz default frequency at 1.32 volts CPU voltage. The resulting CPU Tcase temperature also dropped to 45 degrees Celsius, as you can see in the lovely FullHD UEFI BIOS screenshot.

In the same screenshot, you can see that I managed to slightly tune the Kingston memory and reduce the latency to 11-12-12 at DDR-2400 while dropping the voltage a bit to 1.6 volts. This is only a minor first round tune in to basically lower the power requirements ever so slightly so that a standard 150W Mini-ITX/ITX PSU can handle the whole box including a SSD and a DVD/BD-ROM drive.

Talking about UEFI BIOS, It looks great and gives out a lot of info, but, frankly, functionality wise, all that was there in the old text-mode BIOS user interfaces anyway, and there would be less system overhead with them. Having FullHD UEFI doesn’t save you from having to

toggle multiple screens still, and sometimes there can be a slight lag in getting a setting applied and in effect. Luckily, Gigabyte still provides the text mode BIOS option here.

More to come

So, what to say after this first look? From the point of achievable performance and features, the combo of Intel Devil’s Canyon and Gigabyte GA-Z97N Gaming Mini-ITX board gives up almost nothing compared to much larger format OC platforms, unless you need much more RAM or dual GPUs, among other things. It would be even more fun if Intel’s graphics was yet another step better for actual 3-D game use, but then, I guess, that’s a beyond-Broadwell question for those who’d be willing to wait for “GT4” graphics in Skylake CPU generation. If, aside of 3-D gaming, you’re happy with UHD capable setup that can nicely handle your new high-end TV and still allows an extra GPU if you move it to a little bigger casing, then this is the thing for you.

Based on this initial experience – upcoming benchmarks notwithstanding, since they will be in line with other similar Devil’s Canyon platforms – I would recommend the setup with this Gigabyte board for a Mini-ITX HTPC, on one condition: it should not be fitted into the tightest Mini-ITX casings out there.

Give it a bit of room to spare, including one for a bit better PSU than what Mini-ITX boxes usually supply. Here I ran it with a standard 500W ATX PSU for the initial stability purposes, however the main review will include trying out a few Mini-ITX casing and PSU combos on it right out of Shenzhen factories in a week’s time – after all, it will be one of our Mini-ITX reference platforms until Broadwell shows itself.

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Devil’s Canyon, Intel’s new K – SKU Haswell chips have arrived.

The 4690K and 4790K are the new chips that have four cores running at 4GHz (with 4.4GHz Turbo / 4.5 Max single core Turbo). These were created with the goal of being able to provide higher clocks stably so there are new features that have been added to these chips. There are added capacitors and beefed up power delivery design with these CPUs.

One of the much talked about new features is the reworked TIM called Next-Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material (NGPTIM). With the enhanced specs of Haswell comes a higher Wattage spec for these chips as well, now at 88W (4790K) up from 84W (4770K). The Z97 is spec-ed for these chip’s higher wattage, and they were initially only going to be allowed on the Z97 boards. Intel did change their mind before release and will allow companies to add in support for these chips to some of its current Z87 boards. This will likely require a BIOS update and limited support to the beefier z87 boards that can handle the expected loads.

Testing of the 4790K ES was done with the MSI Z97 MPOWER MAX AC (watch for the review coming up), with a closed water-cooling loop Asetek design from Thermaltake that has a dual 120mm fan radiator. The benchmarks will show the highest speed the benchmark was able to run and remain stable at.

Devil’s Canyon Testing Platform:

• Intel 4790K ES
• MSI MPOWER MAX AC
• MSI R9 290X LIGHTNING
• Team Vulcan DDR3 2400 11-13-13-35 2x8G
• Mushkin Chronos 240GB SSD
• Silverstone Strider 1KW PSU
• Thermaltake Water 3.0 Extreme
• Win7 Ultimate 64-bit

After hours of tinkering and the failure to attain the goal of 5GHz which had been set, I found a very solid clock speed of 4.7GHz (47×100), at 1.29v. It was clear that quality cooling this processor is priority number one for anyone expecting to run one with stability. Going above 4.7GHz required substantial voltage bumps for each small jump in speed. Though 5GHz and slightly above was possible with the same cooling setup, it was only stable enough for the single threaded benchmark load. The increased voltage made it very touchy with stability under load. I settled in with 4.7GHz as I was able to run the speed with low voltage and was solid.

Benchmarks

At 4.7GHz paired with DDR3 2400 RAM this is a formidable system for sure. It is an absolute beast in gaming benchmarks as well as productivity benchmarks.

3DMARK Firestrike Overall

(Higher is better)

You can see that the scores do go up incrementally with the CPU speed increases, although not drastically in the overall scores. This shows that the CPU scores are very heavily outweighed by GPU performance in overall results

Firestrike Standard

(Higher is better)

The scaling of the physics score is in line with what can be expected. You can see the gain that can come with a decent overclock on the 4790K.

Firestrike Extreme

(Higher is better)

Again the scaling is in line with what you would expect on the Extreme test.

PCMARK 8

(Higher is better)

There is fairly uniform scaling across all three benchmarks that were done.

Cinebench r11.5

(Higher is better)

Cinebench performance was good and it scales nicely with the frequency increase.

AIDA64 Memory Benchmark

(Higher is better)

As you can see the numbers are about the same across the board with the memory at 2400 at all speeds. The numbers are especially strong and are even rivaling a quad channel setup.

Looking back I am extremely happy with my clock of 4.7 GHz achieved with this chip. Being very stable at this speed, paired with the very nice bandwidth of the RAM will be ideal. If the retail version holds true to these ES chips there is no doubt you will see many people running these up to 5GHz. It is going to be interesting as it will be harder on the cooling under load, we will likely be seeing people running fairly high voltages.

What’s not to like?

The disappointing thing is that these are really no better than the previous gen standard Haswell K SKUs. They are just as random with the overclock ability, it is hit or miss and it’s unfortunate that with these new adjustments to the “sauce” that we don’t see the majority of them surpassing 4.6 GHz with ease.

This is very apparent when looking at overclockers who test many CPUs looking for their ideal piece of hardware. Many who might test 10+ different CPUs are reporting that the results are all over the place and you don’t really see a tight average grouping of their tests. I noticed that I wasn’t getting a boost in memory clocking with the Devil’s Canyon as well.

The furthest I was able to push it with my previous Haswell (4670K ES) was about 2.8 GHz, I find I am topping out there as well. Though I don’t have some kits to push even further I can say that the RAM overclocking is good. Unfortunately, I am finding that I am hitting the wall of my memory kit and can push no further. As someone who is looking to get back into extreme overclocking I am personally finding this disheartening, I will have a tough time to find my ideal piece.

Is it worth a buy?

Would I buy a 4690K or a 4790K?  I would buy one as a CPU for a new system, but not as a replacement for 4670K/4770K.  If you are looking to build a new system, definitely that the 4690K or 4790K will be a great addition to the build. I would take it over the older 4670K or 4770K as it has definitely been an improvement over those, even if it isn’t a huge one.

I do not suggest that you upgrade from the one of the previous Haswell K CPUs. I think that spending the money to upgrade with the possibility of little or no improvement wouldn’t be worth it. So at the end my main thought is that it is a nice improvement and a great CPU, but not worth the upgrade from 4670K or 4790K. I look forward to what Intel’s engineers come up for us overclockers next.

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Enthusiasts are on a never ending quest to find better cooling for their CPUs.  Air cooling is the norm these days, but affordable water cooling systems are becoming more affordable.  Water cooling is the next step and can provide great cooling effectiveness.  There are two ways to install a water cooling system into a computer. They are piecing together a system from individual parts, or a “closed-loop” system.  Closed loop water cooler contains the block, pump, and radiator in a sealed loop (that usually require no maintenance).  Many companies are now coming out with their own closed loop systems for enthusiasts.

Today we will look at Thermaltake’s Water 3.0 Extreme closed loop cooler and see how it preforms.  The cooler is Thermaltake’s top end closed loop system, and has a 240mm radiator.  The pump for the system is built into the water block, which can mount to multiple AMD and Intel sockets.

After seeing the pictures you will probably be thinking “I have seen this kit before”, indeed you have if you have looked into AIO water cooling kits.  Asetek is the ODM for this and many other kits and some would argue that the company has a monopoly on the AIO water cooling hardware industry.  Recently, Asetek has caused a stir in being granted another liquid cooling patent by the USPTO which may ultimately hurt consumers. Unfortunately for consumers, Asetek’s aggressive patenting and litigation hurts consumers’ ability to have choice as most kits are now Asetek based.

The kit has many variations through the various companies who sell variants of it, usually with their own fans, features, and packaging.  Many will be buying the kit for those options weighted heavily on price.  With this kit just under the $100 mark it is a definite contender for your case

Everything was well packaged and secured within the box

Mount kits for multiple sockets of Intel and AMD are included; once again it was well packaged and organized

2 PWM Fans are included with the kit. I am told that these were specifically chosen for the kit and that replacing the fans with higher speed models won’t make a big difference.

The instructions that came with the system are very easy to read and understand I do suggest that you get the latest fan control app from the Thermaltake global website, so you can be up to date.

Everything was intact with no blemishes on the system.  There is a USB cable that attaches to a USB2.0 internal header, if you want to use the fan control app with it.

The base is clean with a very flat surface, though not a mirror surface as it still had some machining visible.  Pre-applied TIM is provided on the base, though many (like me) will clean it off and use some fresh product of choice.

Installation is very straightforward and easy to do; the instructions are clear and nicely drawn out.  The Intel mount which I used was easily installed within a couple of minutes.  The 120mm fans plug into the CPU block/pump combo, which itself plugs into an internal USB 2.0 header as well as CPU fan pin-out on the motherboard.  It can then be automatically controlled via the desktop application via the USB. I suggest that if you want to use the included app to regulate your fans, set CPU fan to 100% in bios (or a curve forcing that) with fan failure alarm set.

Tt Water Software

The application for the water cooling system is very easy to use and allows you to run different profiles.  Silent, Extreme, and Custom which is best for running your own fan profile.  I learned that modifying the Silent or Extreme profiles didn’t seem to work as well as setting up custom profile.  Swapping from one profile to another doesn’t have a fast response and sometimes requires fiddling with multiple times to get it to switch. There are Notification options for the coolant temperature and Fan speed, which are good safety measures.  The main thing you get from the app over just plugging fans into headers on the motherboard are viewing coolant temperature, notifications, and fan profiles based on  CPU temps (if you have the pump plugged into the CPU header).

I stress tested my Intel Core i7 4790K Devil’s Canyon ES at 4.7GHz using OCCT against the Cooler Master TPC-812 (their highest end air cooler) and then again with this Water 3.0 Extreme.  I let it run for about 8 hours and over the times when I checked it I was getting readings that were about an average  8C cooler overall.  The sound level at full speed is very reasonable, and thankfully not too distracting.

Overall I would recommend this kit based on its ease of installation, performance, and cost.  I think that the price point is good for a dual 120mm Asetek ODM all-in-one cooler as other of the same type can go for up to $30 more.  The performance is definitely there, holding the 4790K ES solidly @ 4.7GHz while being stressed 100 %.  The only real issue that I saw with this kit was the control app can be a bit buggy, although works well aside from that.

Thermaltake Water 3.0 Extreme retails for $99.99 on Amazon.com right now.

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Intel has made it quite clear that they are dead set on reviving the PC market, especially from the high performance desktop point of view. They are showing their commitment to that vision today with the announcement of their new Devil’s Canyon refresh to the Haswell CPUs that they had launched last year. These new Devil’s Canyon CPUs are designed to accompany the company’s newly launched Z97 chipset, which adds a few minor features to the already existing Z87 chipset that Haswell had launched with. In fact, Gigabyte launched their full Z97 line of motherboards yesterday incorporating some of the new features of the Z97 chipset, including future compatibility with 5th Generation Core CPUs.

Intel 9 Series Chipset Overview

These new Devil’s Canyon CPUs are designed to slot in where the old Haswell CPUs sat in terms of price, while delivering a new level of performance on the CPU end. And yes, these new CPUs do have a 4w higher TDP at 88W vs. 84W. But in reality Devil’s Canyon is merely an overclocked version of the Core i7 4770K and Core i7 4670K. The only real differences are that the clock speeds are higher on the 4790K with the base clock being 4.0 GHz, Intel’s first chip that has all four cores running at 4 GHz stock speed. The boost clock is also 4.4 GHz versus the 4770K’s 3.9, but that’s only for a single CPU core in most cases.

Intel Devil’s Canyon

Devil’s Canyon Improvements

As you can see above, the primary changes that Intel has made with Devil’s Canyon are seen through their decision to add more resistors on the bottom of the GPU to help smooth out power delivery to the CPU. They also changed the thermal interface material (TIM) to their new Next-Generation Polmer Thermal Interface Material. They did this because a lot of overclockers complained about the TIM in Haswell because it simply didn’t overclock as well as many had expected it to. So, in fact, Devil’s Canyon is really a re-do more than anything really and Intel is sponsoring a ton of overclocking events here at Computex in order to see how high they can get overclockers to push these new CPUs.

Devil’s Canyon Pricing

In addition to the new Devil’s Canyon chips being supported on Z97, Intel has also made it clear that these new chips should work no problem with the previous Z87 chipset, a reversal of what we were originally told back at GDC earlier this year. Back then, we criticized Intel for forcing people into a new motherboard for no reason and it looks like they listened and most Z87 boards will probably support the Devil’s Canyon chips with a simple microcode update to the BIOS. While Devil’s Canyon isn’t necessarily much of a change for Intel in terms of architecture, it does show that they’re committed to improving and listening to consumers which is important. And if you build a Z97 system with a Devil’s Canyon chip, you can always upgrade to Broadwell when it comes out next year.

Now, last but not least, Intel is also announcing a Pentium Anniversary edition, which they also had pre-announced at GDC. This new processor is merely an unlocked higher clocked version of the Pentium processor designed to commemorate the processor’s 20 year anniversary and to give overclockers something to mess with and push with some overclocking to see how high they can get the CPU to go. We’ve got pricing for this new CPU below with the 1000 piece pricing being $72.

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