Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel this is a much-needed follow-up video to last week's gaming showdown between my five-year-old computer and a modern-day skylake PC which was kind of like watching Ronda Rousey beat up a small kitten or watching Holly Holm bait up Ronda Rousey as expected the results showed the new PC leading by a landslide indicating that my old rig was in need of a sizeable upgrade in order to stay competitive and while that's still true to some degree in the video I failed to specify which part of my old PC would make the most sense to upgrade and this might have caused some confusion after all a typical gaming workload is far more GPU bound than it is CPU dependent so there's a fair chance that simply upgrading the video card in my old system would have allowed it to yield similar gaming results as our skylight build this would be great news for us because it would mean that we'd have to spend significantly less money on a single component to essentially recommission our old gaming rig so in order to find out if a new GPU is really all it takes to get us back in the game so to speak today will once again be comparing my old Sandy Bridge PC to our skylake build this time around however we'll be using the GPU a gtx 970 as a constant having the same beefy video card in both systems will help us pinpoint any cpu slowdowns of our older 2600 k and ultimately reveal whether it's worth upgrading to something like the 6700 k in our current gen pc now before we look at the benchmarks another oversight from last week's video that I wanted to quickly address is my referring to our skylake build here as a 2016 PC when the system is in fact using hardware that released no later than 2015 so my apologies for the misleading Burbidge I should have learned by now that if you stretch the truth to thousands of people usually someone will notice on to our testing methodology though my old rig has been reincarnated as my wife's current gaming PC using our core i7 2670 7 platform with 8 gigs of ddr3 whereas our current gen system is a cut-down version of my sleeper PC featuring the latest 6700 K on the z170 chipset with 16 gigs of DDR for both systems are using this EVGA GTX 970 for the win Edition ethics CAD we're also using the same overclock settings as we did in last week's video except the 2600 K has received a 100 megahertz boost since then landing it at 4.5 gigahertz our 6700 K remains at a stable 4.4 gigahertz and our GTX 970 was overclocked just north of 1500 megahertz in both systems all games tested were run at full HD and quad HD on a final note the skylake PC is running Windows 10 and due to ongoing driver issues that I mentioned last week the Sandy Bridge is on Windows 8.1 so without further ado let's dive right in with 3dmark fire strike Xtreme as you can see both computers are completely neck-and-neck in their overall score with the old system actually bringing home a slightly higher graphics score whether this is due to differently matured OS drivers or simply a margin of error I can't be sure but the synthetic test looks very promising for our 2600 K that being said if leave it to our first gaming benchmark to tell us a slightly different story in GTA 5 we see the 6700 K with an increase in average FPS by 28% at 1080 the biggest performance gap you'll see in today's testing move along to quad HD however and the new rig only performs 8 percent better on average so why is the performance gap between the two pcs so much wider at the lower resolution well this is actually our first sign of CPU bottlenecking with the 2600 K with the lower resolution of 1080 our GTX 970 is able to draw frame so quickly that it's left waiting on the cpu to send it instructions for more frames you could say that the GPU is filling orders faster than the 2600 K can write them when gaming at higher resolutions however most of the additional work required to render those extra pixels falls on to the GPU so the CPU is then able to keep pace much more effectively and is no longer the bottleneck in fact the system has now become GPU bound at the higher resolution and since both systems are using the same GPU this explains the smaller performance gap between them at quad HD circling back to the game though it's pretty evident that our upgraded 2600 K is more than capable of handling GTA v with no minimum dips below 30 FPS even beyond 1080 hitman absolution yields very similar results where we see a big leap at 1080 for the 6700 K and a much smaller performance gain at quad HD another I'm example of CPU bottlenecking at low resolutions all the same the 2600 K system saw a great overall performance with no red flags indicating the need to upgrade our system further in Metro last light we see the continued trend of a wider performance gap at 1080 but much less so this time around this mostly stems from the benchmark being incredibly taxing which means our GTX 970 already has its hands full at 1080 since the GPU is hard at work neither of our CPUs are really breaking a sweat at this point which is why there's little to showcase the performance difference between our Sandy Bridge and skylight chips finally the results in battlefield 4 parallel those found in the Metro last light benchmark as this is also right up there on the list of demanding triple-a titles performance gains of the current gen PC are so minimal here that it could almost be chopped up to margin of error but either way this demonstrates how relevant the 2600 case still is especially at high resolutions or in GPU intensive games so to be perfectly clear if you have an older high-end system from half a decade ago simply slapping in a new video card can certainly breathe new life into your PC since GPUs are seeing bigger improvements year over year than CPUs and not to mention most games rely heavily on GPU processing anyway unless you require additional CPU horsepower for workstation applications or you're just an enthusiast who always needs to be on the latest platform an upgraded system like this should suffice quite nicely for the next few years but that's pretty much gonna wrap it up for now guys hopefully this quick video cleared up some things that I left out last week and hopefully those of you with ageing desktops found this video to be a bit helpful if any of you guys were using older CPUs paired with newer video cards by the way feel free to share your setups in the comments below and let us know how that's been working out for you also don't forget to toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it before you go you can also check the description below for awesomesauce shirts or bookmark my amazon affiliate link you use when you buy stuff as always I'm Kyle with awesome says Network thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I'll see you all on the next video