Conclusion
Having a closer look at the results we gathered
while testing eight different
games and two different benchmarks with two different presets, we see that the
Intel Core i7-4930K, with our "low-preset" is on average 10 percent faster than the
Core i7-3930K. Switching to our "high-preset" makes the Intel Core
i7-4930K
become 7 percent quicker than the Core i7-3930K. Overclocking the Intel Core
i7-4930K to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by 12 percent
and when it comes to the high-preset
the increase in performance is 12 percent. Regarding the Core i7-3930K the
situation is a little bit different: 8 percent gain with "low-preset" and
20 percent
with "high-preset". Other than that a quick look at power consumption
is also interesting. In this case we see that overclocking the Core
i7-4930K to 4.5 GHz makes power consumption to go up by almost 21 percent. With the
Core i7-3930K we see there is only an additional 7
percent needed.
In the past we've been testing the same system equipped with only one high-end
single GPU graphics card. Especially in case of our high-preset the graphics
card is then going to be the limiting factor, meaning changing the CPU or even
overclocking processors doesn't make for a decent performance difference. As
soon as we're adding a second high-end graphics card, the bottleneck regarding
graphics cards is open and overclocking CPU architecture as well as CPU clocks
will make a difference even with the high preset.
Should you be thinking about buying a Core i7-4930K processor for your gaming
PC, in which you have two high-end graphics cards running in SLI, then the
performance gain, when upgrading from a Core i7-3930K to a Core i7-4930K is
going to be about 10 percent on average. Keeping in mind this CPU costs about
450 Euro we should be asking ourselves if this is really worth the
additional money. If you put in perspective what difference a new graphics card
can make regarding frames per second, then the answer is simply: no, isn't. But should
you be one of the power users who always demands the best possible components,
then the Core i7-4930K certainly is an upgrade.