Gadgetory

the Intel Core i5 2500 K was easily the most popular processor of its time along sides of 2600 K Sandy Bridge has been able to hold strong through several generations of Intel processors and Andy's next big architecture launch is only just now occurring then should be here in February and KB Lake has already arrived so now it seems like a good time to finally start considering upgrades from Sandy Bridge and that's what we're testing today before we get into that this coverage is brought to you by Thermaltake and their Corp III ATX case which is wall mountable and can act as an easy access test bench with high quality materials learn more at the link in the description below in this revisit of the i-5 2500 case and E Bridge processor we'll be testing sandy bridges that stay in power into 2017 we've got the 2600 K on here but we're focusing on the 2500 K for today this includes blender rendering speeds that would be a production application and workload which is a bit more unique because there's some multi-threading advantage there and we looking at a handful of modern games watchdogs to Battlefield 1 all of those a couple of synthetic tests just to provide a baseline of numbers and this testing is limited to performance so we're looking at FPS and completion time for benchmarks thermal power all that stuff's been done for this processor and it hasn't changed so we're not going to be revisiting it today the 2500 K alongside the 60 series of chipsets or the 6 Series that would be stains like z68 do you remember that chipset and platform but it was also compatible with these 77 motherboards critically and that's sort of still true today where we have z170 z2 70 have some inter compatibility depending on which CPU you're looking at for potential upgrade so 2500 K also has a base frequency of 3.3 gigahertz and a turbo is up to 3.7 gigahertz and it can fairly effortlessly overclock to 4.5 gigahertz or there abouts may be a 1.3 voltage and you can tune plus or minus based on your particular processor with the right cooler so it was a flexible CPU and now it's just important to see how it's held up as for TDP and other specs that CPU had the same TDP as modern Intel CPUs though it's significantly less powerful and operates at a lower clock rate which hand-in-hand the memory support on the 2500 K was also limited and it's somewhat critical to performance changes in some specific applications the right motherboard went a long way in this regard you can still run the higher memory speeds but still not anything like what we have today and of course there's a ddr3 vs ddr4 chains as well and a case anyone's forgotten the i/o has changed a lot since 2011 so HS i/o now consists of things like m2 nvme and a whole slew of devices that are enabled via the PCIe bus and that's not really something that was that popular or even in some cases like nvm II didn't even exist when the CPU came out especially not in consumer applications so that's a big change and it's something you should account for with upgrade plans because moving forward even if the percent gains may be minimal in some use cases the advantage from new i/o devices could be a lot higher than just a raw CPU gain and of course PCIe gen3 is now everywhere and USB 3 multiple generations of it even Gen 1 and Gen 2 have pretty much proliferate in the market so the markets been shaken up a lot for i/o and that's probably the biggest change here other than the usual clock rate and because we're testing so many CPUs on different platforms that means that we have multiple test benches to define those are all defined and the article link in the description below which also contains a few extra charts that won't be in this video check that link if you have any questions about what motherboard was used and what memory was used because we'll be changing between ddr3 and 4 of course as we iterate through the CPU generations and that's all defined in the article test methodology page one more thing to note here before getting started this is our edition of i5 CPU to the CV benchmark this was promised in our i7 7700 K review next will be to add a 3s and FX CPUs each one of these sort of core series updates does take a lot of work so we're doing them incrementally fxs to ni3 'soon and that is in preparation of course for Xen and for the i3 KB Lake CPUs that we'll be looking at shortly the first test is our blender benchmarks at GM's Andrew Coleman made the full methodology is on the site again but basics are that we're rendering a 4k image of these various monkey heads each monkey has different effects applied to it all stressing the components in different ways during GPU benchmarking for instance we notice that the fur monkey stresses GPU memory in some ways that are not the same for CPUs as the chart demonstrates this is a benchmark where multi-threaded CPU is really shine the additional threads are fully utilized for each 16 by 16 pile that we render so two times the threads means two times the active in flight tiles being rendered simultaneously we already talked to i7 numbers in the 7700 K review so we're focusing on the core i5 CPU today the Intel i5 2500 K with its stock frequency settings is able to render our scene and 106 minutes making it the slowest device on the bench by a long shot the 35 70 K CPU released about a year later in second quarter 2012 completes the frame in 94 minutes a modern CPU like last gens i5 6600 K is able to complete that task in 73 minutes and of course the 7600 K is a bit faster than that so we're looking at about a 30 minute faster render time over the 2500 K or a reduction of about 31% time required between the 2500 K and the 6600 K if you're rendering using this CPU as you might do if running both GPU and CPU on a render task then the upgrade is clearly substantial and something that should have been done a long time ago to provide some perspective for Sandy Bridge the same gen I 720 600 K is able to render the scene at about the same time as an i5 6600 K a multi-generational difference at 74 minutes if you bought an i7 2608 you're still in pretty decent shape in this particular benchmark at least compared to today's i5 CPU a trivial overclock to 4.5 gigahertz on the 2500 K moves us up to an 82 minute render time absolutely a worthwhile improvement and if you're stuck on the cpu rendering intro a while it's probably something that should be done let's move on to Cinebench synthetics we're seeing the i-5 2500 K operate expectedly at the bottom of the bench the 2500 K is pushing single core performance at 124 C D Marx was multi-core at 460 marks the overclocked variant at 4.5 gigahertz again pretty easy performs ahead of the i5 3570 ka saag cpu and just under the i5 4690k in a single core and even in multi-core performance 3d Mars fire strike is posting the i5 2500 K at 13 for 98 total points or six one nine zero on physics and that's the score we care the most about since its isolates the CPU and remove the GPU from the equation the 3570 KS off marginal improvements to 6 808 and the 2600 K is pretty heavily improved in physics when it's nine is zero three three score as for what this means in practice here's the 3d mark FPS output we're seeing a physics FPS of 19.7 on the twenty five hundred K compared to twenty six one overclock the i-5 35 70 K on 4690k both fall between the stock and overclocked 2500 kcp use there's some variants intestinal 3d marks so keep that in mind but these results are reliable nonetheless there is just a bit of variance between tests and that's all synthetic of course and there's only so far we can get with synthetics we've got times five benchmarks in the article links below if you'd like to see more but with newer api's but let's move on to FPS benchmarks for now there are a lot of different ways to do game benchmarks for CPUs so again article below for the full methodology but the basics are we've mixed in some CPU limited games and then a couple that would appear to be GPU limited once you reach the high end but do show some pretty substantial changes as we approach the low end of CPUs where the GPU is now being bottlenecked by the CPU so there's still worthwhile to test and provide a fuller picture of actual performance across various games rather than just a whole bunch of carefully picked CPU benchmarks starting with watchdogs 2 we can now reveal why we added this game to our CV benchmarking workload with the high end i7 CPUs we undoubtedly begin to battle with other system resources like the GPU even though it's a GT X 1080 FTW in the system and that means the differences between the skylake and KB like i7 cpus are harder to detect as we scale down though the CPU choke becomes readily apparent the 2500 K is limiting our 1080 FTW to 59 FPS average when at 1080p with high settings and that's a card which is capable of achieving that clearly at least 2 X 5 performance when using the latest cpu's if you're running the a stock i-5 2500 K this is about the maximum performance you can expect on our particular benchmark course primetime performance isn't exactly bad it just scales linearly with the average so 35 70 K shows a reasonable improvement but even that gain is outdone by an overclock on the 2500 K at a 4.5 gigahertz this isn't hard to do and can be held at around 1.3 volts so your mileage may vary and produces higher averages and 0.1% lows then the 35 70 K is capable of more interestingly we see the same gen 2,600 K really stretch its legs and watchdogs to producing an additional 15 or so frames per second on the 2500 K this is where you get your value in those i7 purchases several years ago better longevity mostly and it's probably one of the most interesting stories here we'll soon see if that carries over to other games though with watchdogs to were generally seeing that multi-core CPUs are advantaged and the i5 4690k in 4790k i7 CPU have a sizable gap between them as well furthering this point but as for the 2500 K versus modern TV purchases a linear upgrade would land you on the 7600 or 6600 K it was which produced an extra 20 FPS or so average frame rate throughput frame times improve in step with this and watchdogs is a game where you could generally get by with the lower FPS so the upgrade isn't necessary you could be pretty happy at 40 to 45 FPS if not a stickler for hitting 60 all the time but the point is that an upgrade would better allow for higher graphics settings where at high here but moving to ultra would be more acceptable with a higher-end cpu battlefield 1 doesn't show as much change at the very high end where our 1080p ultra settings are landing the KB Lake sky Lake and Devil's Canyon i7 CPU is all roughly in the same performance range where we do see a change though is dropping down to the 2500 kctu the 2500 case don't performs reasonably well in battlefield 1 despite becoming a bottleneck with 1080 FTW and is operating at 115 FPS average with the overclocked version at 124 FPS average the 35 70 K performs about where the overclocked 2500 K performs and the 4690k starts pulling away from the 2500 in a more dramatic fashion the CPU is certainly slower but still keeps up pretty well in battlefield 1 only if you're pushing for higher refresh gameplay or upgrading into 10 17 10 to 80 class hardware will a bottleneck could be really noticeable to a point of requiring that CPU upgrade unlike wall socks to the difference between the I 720 605 2500 KCBS is not as substantial total war is new to our CPU bench and thus far only features i5 series CPUs before diving in note that total war does output frame rates with a good amount of variants at the low end especially this means we won't really be using the 0.1% metric as much since it fluctuates past the pass and seems inconsistent overall we're also only testing with DirectX 11 because dx12 has with some issues it's performance just isn't as good as the x11 and so we're not testing it for steam at 2500 K perform at about 92 FPS with 1080p and high settings for this benchmark overclocking provides at substantial gains pushing us up to 114 FPS average with bolstered frame times the performance improvement is about 24% absolutely worth the overclocked for sure and looking to modern CPUs the 6600 K is capable of operating at 156 average with the 7600 K at 165 average from the 2500 case of at 7600 K we're seeing a stock clock rate difference totaling and resulting in 73 FPS average or a percentage increase of about 80 percent the final benchmark is GTA 5 and we had some confusing issues with this one that arose I still want to include the benchmark because accurate for every other CPU except for two of them and those are something they require some further investigation maybe someone out there has encountered this but basically with the 6600 K and 7600 K we were seeing some stuttering that was not occurring on the other CPUs making it for slightly dragged down averages but really heavily impacted 0.1% low values again only on those two CPUs is 66 and 70 600 K when I tweet it out we posted a tweet asking if anyone has seen this because we will responded J from Jay's to sense that he saw something similar in the past with one of his CPUs so it's definitely something that's known we've done everything from reinstalling Windows to on GTA drivers XMP changes all that stuff and the issue persists so this seems to be less of an ordeal when dropping XMP when turning off that profile and going down to something like 21 33 megahertz but it's still present still we haven't got it fully figured out yet but the benchmarks are still good for everything else those two CPUs have a bit of an asterisk next to them because of that performance anomaly right now it looks like some sort of GTA issue when testing with our config if anyone's got thoughts on this post them below so the charts we're looking at an average FPS of 101 with the i5 2500 K with overclocking pushing off to an impressive 124 FPS average compared to the i7 2670 it seems to provide the biggest impact to performance at least for the most part by 535 70 K operates about 11 FPS faster than the stock I 5 2500 K and then again the other i5 is 6670 600 K just seems to have some issues but are definitely at least 123 to 129 fps and the averages we've done due diligence on these to try and figure out that issue with those 2 CPUs again Windows reinstall completely fresh platform drivers CPU changes XMP changes over clocks and not over clocks to check the memory bus or a memory controller she'd rather lots of things to try but didn't quite figure those throughout so that's the way it goes sometimes for ashes of the singularity and Metro last light if you want to see those results check the link for the full article in the description below as always and that will contain additional benchmarks and some further analysis the 2500 K has held up relatively well for the past 5 years but it's starting to show some serious age in a few specific game watchdogs two-for-one post fairly sizable differences between modern CPUs on a 2500 K though multi-core seems to matter more for that particular title we're also seeing big gains from overclocking in a lot of games especially because the 2500 K was so easy to overclock if you've got one it might be worth throwing it under a good cooler maybe an a IO and pushing it for 4.5 gigahertz to the remainder of its life blender and rendering tasks are particularly abusive to the I've 2,500 K which is being outpaced nearly two folds by modern successors it's a good time to upgrade some of the 2500 K a CPU has held on really well as of the 2600 K and it's still hanging on but it is kind of nearing the end of life where modern GPU is if you're buying one might get bottlenecks by the i-5 particularly if you're going for anything above 10 60 and 480 class like the 1070 and 1080 and whatever Vega may bring so that means it is now good to look for KB Lake and then now normally we don't really recommend waiting for CPU or GPU or really just component upgrades in general because unless there's something really specific you want a lot of the time it's just waiting for the sake of waiting because you can wait forever in the computer hardware world there's always something new but Zen is very close at this point it should be launching next month and that's close enough to wait especially when you've already have the CPU for five years or so and also then now normally if a new Intel CPU were coming out next month I might suggest not waiting just because we know their gains are pretty small on average generally if you need a system now it's worth buying zen is a big deal for AMD they haven't released anything major for several years now almost since this CPU came out twenty five hundred K so it's worth waiting around if you can to see how it goes we'll revisit the topic when we review the Rison CPUs for now it's either a 7600 K or 6600 K if you can find one for cheaper than the kb lake alternatives because basically the same but if they're used or something you can get a cheaper go for it but a 4690k might also be worth looking into if you can find one for cheap on Newegg amazon or somewhere they're dumping a bunch of them to make room on the shelves but that's all I got for you so 2500 K pretty interesting results especially in watch dogs to subscribe for more as always patreon link in the post roll video links in the description below for more information I'll see you all next time you