Alright, so my AMD build took a mean shit and blue screened me every 5 minutes. I did some searching and found out that the reason was because the VRM on my Gigabyte finally caved in. Running it stock and minimal settings works fine, but if i try to run it hard at all, issues occur. This gave me an excuse to upgrade, considering AM3+ is a dead socket. I really enjoyed my 8350 but the only sensible thing would be going Formula Z IMO and i didn't feel like spending $200 for a board that won't have any longevity for performance.
So i caved in and got myself an i7-4790k and a Gigabyte Z97-UD3H. Now i had really good luck with my prior 990fx-ud3 rev.1.1 board considering it's a launch day motherboard, price to performance ratio, and overall build quality. That's 4 years old board, never had a single problem within those 4 years until this weekend, considering the board had a 3 year warranty, it did a great job. My reasoning for going intel was just the main stream support. Overall, better SATA controllers, better VRM, CPU overall better and great thermals with devils canyon, overall better longevity considering m.2 and SATA express integration. I looked at MSI (later i pushed that thought aside, always had bad luck with MSI products), and ASUS as well where i was considering the ASUS Maximus VII Hero board but i actually got 2 bad boards in a row. First one had a few extra long pins which if i stuck my chip in there would bend the pins. Second one came with missing pins which i thought possibly could have worked and got error code 55 (cpu/socket issues). Since i had bad luck with 2 Maximus Hero boards i went straight to my faithful companion....Gigabyte. I'm a little bummed because i really like the aesthetics of that board but 2 bad boards is a sign IMO.
Now let's talk about the Z97-UD3H and the i7-4790k. Installing it was quite easy, everything just worked seamlessly and my only main complaint was that the board is not a standard ATX size, it's actually 2 inches shorter, so the "standard" atx screw holes were not there, i could only screw in half of it, so it's not entirely seated in the case. Not a big deal but a cause for concern if you constantly swap graphics cards, cpu's, coolers, etc.. Installing from USB was great, though i wouldn't suggest using USB 3.0 because it does not work in UEFI mode if you're installing a GPT partition. If you install it standard with MBR partition, then USB 3.0 works fine. Kind of weird but whatever, something easy to overlook. After installing Windows 8.1 I installed all the drivers and benchmarking software. I did have one issue installing drivers, and that was the Realtek audio software. I use a 5.1 speaker set up and the drivers/software doesn't detect my center channel as seperate so my center and subwoofer is ran by my subwoofer now. Rear speakers run as my center speaker. I tried everything to fix that, but seems like this motherboard really wants you to use 2 channel speakers. Not that big of a deal but more of an inconvenience because i like to watch movies off my PC and high def movies really like to use 5.1 audio, easy fix..i just remapped my center channel to my left and right speaker and turned my center speaker into a blend of left and right channel. Those two issues would be my only complaint, i have sent Gigabyte a message about it and we'll see what they say.
So after installing everything, i did some overclocking and EASILY got it to 4.7Ghz @ 1.35v running all 4 cores with no problems. I think i could probably push this to 5.0Ghz and with my h100i cooler it's real easy to get there. By far an easier overclocker than the 8350. Even though the 8350 was easy, it's just that i had to dial in ALOT to get my northbridge to handle my 8350 to 4.8ghz @ 1.43v. My only complaint about 4790k is that the power scales very inefficiently compared to 2700k. I had tons of friends that i've set up their Sandy Bridge and bearly rose up the voltage to get 25% overclock. I know i'm just nit picking so don't take my opinion too seriously, just an observation. I know CPU's it's all about the silicon lottery and i got a perfect 8350 when i had my AMD build.
Benchmarking, i gotta say that the 4790k is WAY ahead of the 8350. I understand that the chip is $340 compared to AMD's that was $200, and i'll give AMD the win on price to performance; but what i do is rendering and the 4790k just smokes the 8350 in that. i did some 3dsmax render that i've done prior with over 1 million polygons, textured, and done with v-ray. The gap in performance was quite apparent. On the 8350, a render like that would have taken about 2-3hrs +-10 min; while the 4790k did it in 1.5-2hrs +- 10min. I don't have exact statistics but in the real world that's actually noticeable. I understand that renders like that require heavy graphics, but with V-Ray you can use the aid of CPU/RAM to improve render times. So when i did this i taxed everything, all cores, all 16gb of ram, and my 780 while overclocked 30%. It seems like the board itself utilizes the graphics card better...i'm not sure if it's because of PCI-E 3.0(i highly doubt it!!!), or the direct connection from CPU>PCI-E compared to AMD with CPU>NB>PCI-E.
Overall, i'm glad for this buy, i was really hoping to get a Maximus VII Hero but i'm not going to sweat over it considering the difference from that to the UD3H is quite minimal...more for overclockers than anything. If i come up with any issues with my set up, i'll be sure to report it. As of now, i'm quite a happy customer!!!