I had some extra disposable income from bonuses and such, so decided to upgrade the CPU in my main rig from an i5-4590 to an i7-4770, knowing it would not be a huge upgrade except in very specific situations. I wanted to max out my system (an HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Tower). Well, almost max it out, as it does support the 4790K, but the price premium on the K processors was more than I could swallow. Now my cpu is completely out of the way in games, putting the bottleneck squarely on my gpu (GTX 1650 Super). I did some benchmarking. Here's some highlights:
Cinebench R23 Multi Core:
i5-4590: 3194
i7-4770: 4236 (+32.6%)
(total system power draw during multi core test increased from 67W to 93W...idle power draw remained the same at 28W)
7-Zip 19.0 Benchmark:
i5-4590: 21412
i7-4770: 28761 (+34.3%)
Passmark CPUMark:
i5-4590: 8006
i7-4770: 10345 (+29.2%)
RealBench Image Editing Test:
i5-4590: 47.84 seconds
i7-4770: 37.15 seconds (22% faster)
RealBench Encode Test:
i5-4590: 256.98 seconds
i7-4770: 94.25 seconds (2.7x faster)
RealBench Multi-tasking Test:
i5-4590: 399.15 seconds
i7-4770: 115.627 seconds (3.5x faster)
3DMark Sky Diver Physics Test:
i5-4590: 7287
i7-4770: 9813 (+34.7%)
3DMark Fire Strike Physics Test:
i5-4590: 6889
i7-4770: 10173 (+47.7%)
3DMark Time Spy CPU Test:
i5-4590: 3004
i7-4770: 3948 (+31.4%)
3DMark Time Spy Overall Score:
i5-4590: 4273
i7-4770: 4491 (+5.1%)
Doom 2016 showed minor improvements. Average FPS went from 160 to 167; 0.1% low fps went from 105 to 126; cpu usage went from 95% to 67%. GPU usage remains at 95% for both cpus.
GTA V, Tomb Raider 2013, and Metro Last Light Redux showed almost zero improvement in fps or cpu usage. I just don't own any games that are heavily cpu bound.
Total system power draw during Doom 2016 gaming went from 163W to 173W.
edit: The cpu cooler that HP used is pretty amazing. It doesn't look like anything special, but it does screw down as opposed to the snap in holders, maybe that's it. I thought the Haswell i7s were supposed to run pretty hot, but I cannot get this i7-4770 past 59c with two different cpu burn-in programs running simultaneously. I need to remember to take some photos and post here, it's a total sleeper gaming PC.