Gadgetory

following our i5 2500 k revisit we received a lot of requests to produce a similar revisit for the i7 2670 bridge cpu from 2011 that was intel's then flagship core series cpu in this revisit we'll be testing the 2600 k for stock performance and overclocked performance in games on the bench alongside some synthetic tests and a blender test pass before that so this coverage is brought to you by the Computex conference which runs from May 30th to June 3rd in Taipei Taiwan this year Computex is the biggest event of the year for PC hardware and technology where we preview the newest prototypes before they come to market you can recommend attending or following this event online for pros and enthusiasts in the market learn more at the link of the description below for a donor who saw our rising revisit from two days ago at this point you know that there are some fairly important updates to total war Warhammer and battlefield 1 that impact the results of Rison testing after the updates you can check that content for the full detail so note here that we have not fully retested everything with those two games yet the rise in CP is that were retested were the 700x primarily there was some 1700 retesting but not a whole lot and intel has not been rerun through those two games either so this content was tested written and more or less produced during the same week as the rise in revisit content with the exception of running those tests because we had already conducted them previously so we will do further updates with the r5 review is coming soon but for today we have not included the full retest suite of Intel CPUs with those games there may be changes going forward we will see the i7 2670 narrow bench though along with some synthetics so we do have a pretty damn good idea of where the CPU stands today as demonstrated it with the 2500 K old case q Sandy Bridge CPUs were able to overclock upwards of four point five to four point eight gigahertz with reasonable cooling but the stock i7 2604 m-- our 4.5 gigahertz 2500 K synthetic benchmarks and in threat intensive games like watchdogs - although we ended the 2500 K revisit with a conclusion that now is a good time to start thinking about an upgrade to cable a core Rison i7 CPUs are conceived as more future proof today we'll be testing that conception to see how it holds up to reality some 5 or 6 years later with our 5s around the corner now is a good time to start building on this data and of course we'll iterate once of the review embargo lifts for those CPUs just to remind everyone of the specs the i7 $2,600 it was it shipped with a base frequency of 3.4 gigahertz and boosted to 3.8 gigahertz out of the box the CPU also is part of Intel's long-standing i7 core architecture for the enthusiast lineup meaning that it runs 4 cores in 8 threads with the help of hyper threading and points of interest here Sandy Bridge was interesting for two main reasons that we should talk about today and one of those is the dies were soldered to the IHS in most cases and that something intel has not done for a number of years now they do help compound or Tim for the most part for their modern CPUs and the other interesting point is that Sandy Bridge had some challenges with hyper threading that we haven't talked about in a very long time because it hasn't really been a modern part to review so the challenge is there were there generally was no appreciable improvement in frame rates with the games out when the the CPU launched and even in follow-up testing years later like with Metro last light the only benefit was really in some of the frame times so that wasn't something that people were paying attention to at that time this is kind of before the tech report and PC per frame time revolution so it's interesting to look back at it now now that we have more tools and we have a new test approach and when I say we I mean the industry as a whole in general not just gamers Nexus so frame times will be interesting to look at here because they were never really a focus when this chip came out we in the old days saw something like a 1 to 2 percent performance hit at times of hyper threading on or off on the original hyper threaded chips and that was an overhead thing these days that's more or less gone in fact if you disable hyper threading on 7,700 kay you'll see a pretty big performance hit as a bad thing so it's performing as it should be these days for full testing methodology check the link to the description below for Patrick's article we talked about the CPUs tested how they were tested and things like that in the article we will not be approaching some of the topics here today like thermals and power testing because that stuff is going to be the same as it was when the chip launched so it's not really a relevant factor in what we're looking at which is gaming performance and synthetic or render performance thermals haven't changed power hasn't changed other than potentially the difference in modern coolers being much better than they were then so that's all down there we've added kV Lake 1750 k CP use FX 83-70 CPUs and rise in CPUs to these charts which were not present on the 2500 K revisit that may be interesting and the updates have not fully cascaded through all of our CPUs as stated earlier so that means total war and battlefield needs be rerun on the 2600 K and everything else in the most part but this is still good data to provide a foundation of how its aged today especially because those updates most likely impacted rising more than the other chips but we'll soon see if that's the case we're starting with blender and then some synthetic benchmarks and we'll move on to gaming after that at stock frequency the 2600 K took 72 point nine minutes to render our blender scene which was made in the house for a comparison that's about 74 percent slower than the modern i7 that's the 7700 K which finished in 42.4 minutes a 4.7 gigahertz overclock on the 2600 K proved a little unstable with blender initially as usual as this is the longest-running CP test we execute but stabilized after further increasing the V core we were at about one point three five volts maybe a little more at time the 4.7 gigahertz OC allowed the render to complete in fifty four point five minutes which is just behind the i7 4790k stock and just ahead of the i-5 7600 k overclocked and this regard the older i7 is showing its threat advantage over even the newest i5 k be like CPU given that blender doesn't care much about anything other than pure thread count of course clock helps a bit but not that much Josie decreases render time by 26% compared to the stock 2,600 K the 7700 K itself only reduced its render time by nine point seven percent through overclocking so this is a pretty big gain for the Sandy Bridge CPU for owners of the 2600 K who bought the chip originally for a cheap hedge between gaming and TV production workloads now it's not a bad time to upgrade if you've become unsatisfied with performance of course if you're happy with it don't bother but if you need more out of it the r7 1700 completes the same render tasks in 33 minutes without an overclock for a time reduction of 40% over the overclocked to 2600 K that said if you only care about gaming the needs and recommendations change we'll get to that shortly in the gaming section moving on to Cinebench we're on another multi-threaded test that favors at raw thread-count overclocked speeds so it's not bad to have both the overclocked 2600 case chordate 30.5 much higher than its original score of 622 without the overclock but also much lower than any modern eight thread CPU a more reasonable comparison to modern i5s reveals how well the 2600 K has held on comparatively by 5 7600 K a 4 core processor released in 2017 actually scored 5 percent lower thanks to its lack of hyper threading our highest scoring 4 core i7 with a thread the 7700 K at 5.1 gigahertz did exceed the 2600 K by 35% for a total score of 11 22 and the r7 1700 at 4 gigahertz with 29 33 megahertz memory scored 1764 in this test though with a lower single core performance than the overclocked 2600 K on to fire strike the 2600 k's original score and fire strikes demanding physics test was 9033 sandwich in it between the newer I 5s and our results although it managed to cling on and outperform the stock I 560 600 K the stock I 570 600 K finally surpassed to the Sandy Bridge i7 once overclocked though the score jumped to 12,000 57 just shy of the i7 4790k stock performance and higher than every i5 tested overclocked or not looking at these metrics as FPS numbers rather than or is it the 2600 K at 4.7 gigahertz it lands at 38.3 FPS for the physics CPU test whereas the stock 2600 EK x @ 28.7 FPS between them by 5 7600 K and it's overclocked variant land in the 30s with the 4790k just above the overclock 2600 K cr7 1700 stock with 26:56 measures memory performs around 53 FPS with the newest gen I 7 at 46 FPS times pi benchmark results we published on the website in the article again linked below if you want to see those but for now we're going to move into the gaming benchmarks performance and watchdogs 2 is one of the things that necessitated this article in the first place in our 2500 K revisit the overclocked to 2500 K only managed to eke out 67 FPS average while the 2600 case stock hit nearly 74 with no overclock at all at 4.7 gigahertz the 2600 K moves from the 70 3.7 average with lows at 54 and 48 to 89 up 3 FPS average with lows at 64 and 52 this is higher than the r7 1800 axis overclocked peak both with comparable lows and it's higher than any non hyper threaded Intel CPU including the 7700 K with hyper-threading disabled the over car 2600 K is performing right around where the overclocked 70 nodded performs or about 21% behind the 7700 K stock watchdogs 2 is really a best-case scenario since it takes advantage of the available threads more than most of the other games will as far as watchdogs 2 goes upgrading would involve buying a modern i7 a 4790k or newer that is or finding an especially robust r7 none of these seem particularly worth it alone that be from intel or AMD but if you're also upgrading for other reasons like modernized IO and chipsets or other games then there's more to consider and will obviously continue going through - look at those numbers improvements were slightly less impressive in total war Warhammer when compared to watchdogs - but a 15% increase in average FPS with overclocking really isn't bad particularly when looking at the 1% Leo boon 1 30 FPS still isn't exactly competitive when compared to the newest chips on the market and it lags behind even the overclocked I 373 50 K it seems that as we saw in our initial rise in reviews total war or hammer necessarily fully leveraging the number of threads available to it that said and this is really important there's since been an update to total or warhammer that we found to improve rising performance in an important way and you can find that in our previous rise in coverage just from a few days ago this might also hold true for the i7 2670 EPS in total war Warhammer and will update in time for the r5 reviews probably very shortly GTA 5 also ran at about 130 FPS average this time improving from 104 FPS GTA has engine constraints that exhibit themselves with the i5 CPUs as we've discussed a few times in the past so the 2600 K is stuck with comparisons only to r7 and i7 is due to issues with the i5 s and probably other CPUs in the near future but that is an engine constraint not a CPU issue and it's something we've talked about in the past of you're curious to learn more it affects both and the end Intel when four cores or a similar core account is available we see the overclocked to 2600 K performing it below the stock 4790k at 141 FPS average and 99 FPS 1% to lows that's ahead of the r7 family of CPUs there are seven 1700 X with a 34 66 megahertz memory overclock and 3.9 gigahertz core overclock is able to outperform the 2600 K and average framerate though and if you are curious about those numbers again the previous content talks about how we were able to push the r7 to that point Metro last light follows the same trend as other titles and is an interesting one to include because it came out about two years after this CPU was released so that really puts into perspective how old the 2600 K is at this point it offers a moderate improvement again to about 130 fps and that means beating the i5 CPUs and even the r7 but the 2600 K still can't quite approach the 4790k this could be due to something of a memory ceiling being that were limited to 21 33 megahertz but regardless it's quite an achievement for the CPU given again the age of the chip and the dates of Metro last light Sandy Bridge CPUs are an interesting thing to study because of how they've held on first of all advanced modern technology particularly on these storage runs like USB updates again 3 is a new thing with the chips compared to Sandy Bridge the USB 3.1 gen2 m dot 2 device is nvme as a protocol these updates to io have made the Sandy Bridge series increasingly obsolete if that's something you care about but at the same time it's held on reasonably when you consider things like modern coolers being pretty damn affordable comparatively especially in the liquid market where CL CS are now really fairly ubiquitous the affordability of those coolers and the ease of access to overclocking thanks to dozens of guides all over the net because this is an old chip now mean that you can overclock this thing pretty easily so if you own a 22 kind of K and you're not ready to upgrade yet there's two things to think about 1 are you happy with how it's performing today maybe you are if that's the case who cares keep waiting until it is dissatisfying to use the chip the second question is are you willing to overclock it to get it on par with something like a modern i-5 or even just under something like 14 790 K in terms of the Intel comparative charts if you are it takes maybe an hour of work maybe two to get a fairly stable high overclock on the 2600 K chips we were pushing 4.7 the range seems to be about 4.5 and higher I know back in the day some people were hitting 5 gigahertz I'm liquid but definitely 4.5 is fairly reasonable to assume possible with some effort into the tuning and you can find all kinds of guides to help with that so if you can do that you're looking at gains that are definitely something that can actually help push performance to again modern i-5 levels in terms of upgrades if you are on an i7 2670 2 back then you're probably looking at something like an i7 7700 K or an r7 chip maybe the 1700 those would be kind of the two similar options in terms of price for what you're getting now this goes back to our 1700 review and then you should look at our revisit from a few days ago as well if you're looking at Rison basically if you're doing pure gaming and nothing else it's not a bad upgrade to go to something like a 7700 K from a 2600 K especially great overclock the 7700 K to get that kind of gain back from where you were overclock on the 2600 K now there are seven chips come into play when you're looking at something like blender where the difference in blender or other CPU based rendering tasks if you perform those would be larger between the seventy seven hundred and the 1700 well when overclocked especially then perhaps the difference with gaming in some games but for pure gaming especially at higher refresh rates the 7700 K is what we'd push you toward if you're doing those mixed workloads or more production heavy stuff consider eyes and we've got plenty of coverage for you on that if you're curious about Rison and are out of the game or having built something and since you built the 2600 k system overall it's held on pretty damn well keep an eye out for our r5 CPP reviews those will be coming out very shortly if you're in an upgrade cycle and in a holding pattern it's not going to hurt you to wait another week we'd suggest checking those out thanks for watching as always subscribe for more patreon.com slash on how you can help us push this type of content going forward I'll see you all next time you