Comparing 4790k and 7700k at 1440p highlights differences in detail and performance.
Comparing 4790k and 7700k at 1440p highlights differences in detail and performance.
My 4790K is capped at 4.5GHz, just a tiny bit beyond the Turbo Boost speed. Even with a powerful air cooler (Cryorig R1 Ultimate), the fans need to spin quite hard. I've thought about removing it, but I'm really concerned about damaging it. Installing the cooler took me over an hour, and I made a mistake by doing it incorrectly. Honestly, I've never suggested going beyond the 4790K before. I was just pointing out that if someone really wants to upgrade, Skylake could be a better choice.
That's accurate, the 4790K offers a faster boost clock compared to the 4770K. This is why it's often referred to as the silicon lottery. I've known someone who struggles to reach 4.0GHz on their 4770K. My setup was stable around 4.4 initially, but after a few BSoD events while gaming I had to lower it to 4.3. It's surprising how well my 4770K performs with this overclock and passive cooling at 1.325V. I have the CPU fan activated when temperatures exceed 50°C, but it only increases to about 50% of its capacity, keeping things quiet. The peak temperatures I've seen were in the mid-70s, which is still safe. This likely shows how effective the Lucifer V2 cooler is. I'm really impressed, considering it's just a $50 cooler.
My point was that you got lucky. There is a reason Haswell (and now Kaby Lake) benefits more from delidding. You probably know this (it doesn't seem to be common knowledge though), but the thermal paste is fine. It doesn't perform as well as something like Arctic Silver, but it also lasts way longer. The reason delidding is really beneficial (and why it wasn't in Linus's video ) is because the problem lies with the adhesive. Removing all the extra adhesive (Haswell and Kaby Lake tend to have more of it) so that the IHS sits right on top of the die is what gives all the extra performance. Here's a diagram: I've seen a lot of delidding tutorials where the instructors thought it was because of the thermal paste. In reality, it mostly depends on how much extra adhesive was used to hold down the IHS. Credit to EKWB for the diagram
It seems the issue isn't with the GPU but rather the bottleneck at 1440p resolution.