Gadgetory

CPU innovation is dead how many of you feel this way like every time you upgrade your computer you're saving 32 cents on your power bill this month and not getting better performance in games creative applications or even just general usage well the thing about feelings is that they're difficult to quantify so we gathered up every top Intel CPU from the last 10 years and put together an epic comparison for you performance power consumption thermals and price is innovation dead is it more than a feeling death detector gee fuel is the sugar free alternative energy beverage that helps you maintain focus and endurance over long days and gaming sessions use our code at the link below let's start with our testing methodology we used the same video card on every platform even though the GTX 1080 wasn't even a twinkle in Jensen's eye when the Pentium Extreme Edition 9:55 was the king of the hill we did this because we wanted the main variable to be CPU performance rather than allowing this to turn into a comparison of the best overall systems through the years with that said DDR memory has gone all the way from 667 megahertz dual channel to over 2000 megahertz quad channel so our compromise there was to use a high end RAM and motherboard combination that would have been typical at the time we went ten years back and for every year picked out the first extreme edition Intel CPU then for each one we performed the following tests temperature under load overall system power consumption in our skybox stare test and we put it through a suite of modern CPU and gaming benchmarks though since this project already had me tunneling into the dark recesses of my past I was unable to resist benchmarking each CPU on half-life 2 as well using such old hardware presented a few challenges not least of which was we had to use Windows 7 on all of our builds to ensure driver and game support CPU mark was the first test and the results were very boring since they were just numbers on a spreadsheet but then I had John turned it into a graph ah much better while the multi-threaded results that use all of the CPU scores show incremental performance improvements the hidden story here is the single threaded results where we see Intel's current 10 core flagship the 6950 X getting outperformed by chips going all the way back to 2011 in why cruncher a benchmark that calculates 50 million digits of pi we tested in multi-threaded mode which gave us similar results to CPU mark incremental improvements Cinebench proved to be interesting as I initially expected the results would mimic CPU mark but I was pleasantly surprised the 69 50 X sat at the top as king in both multi-threading and single core tests with the oldest chip a Pentium on the bottom lucky dog on to our first real-world benchmark Adobe Media encoder again shows the older x79 chips with their higher single core clock speeds beating the 69 50x in the more commonly used GPU accelerated rendering method a video where we went more into this and why it happens can be found here each of the game benchmarks seems to tell the same old story of incremental performance bumps rise of the Tomb Raider our modern game engine representative managed to scale through all generations only slowing down when going from 8 to 10 cores Crysis 3 representing an older triple-a engine improved very little past the i7 965 as it is not a very multi-threaded title and then there was half-life 2 whose numbers don't show us much other than boring old incremental bumps but here are the results for a nostalgia purposes so yes for the most part each chip performed better than its predecessor but the margin of improvement from chip to chip shows a steady downward trend though I'm sure for some of you this didn't come as much of a surprise Intel has publicly stated their Rd is less focused on huge increases in processing power for consumer pcs because they want to direct their attention to mobile data centers Internet of Things devices and the cloud so then CPU power draw and heat output which are very important to those markets that's way down on newer products right only sort of at idle power saving features have improved this dramatically but when working hard on the high end at least Intel has settled into a thermal and power budget they're comfortable with and they seem to be just adding more cores accordingly so efficiency is up that is performance per watt but your power draw while gaming will likely remain mostly unchanged let's look at pricing trends now for an entire decade a thousand US dollars give or take would get you the pinnacle of Intel consumer engineering not so anymore they're asking a whopping seventeen hundred dollars for their flagship enthusiast product so conclusion time then decreasing performance games and increasing prices the rational human and me might point at the collapse of Moore's law caused by the cost and difficulty of continuing to shrink silicon transistors and Intel's design goals that have shifted to address growing markets rather than shrinking ones to explain this but the conspiracy theorist and me noticed three things one after 2011 we stopped seeing large single core performance bumps from extreme edition chips and after 2013 we stopped seeing tangible single core improvements in consumer chips at all - the last time AMD had a CPU in competition with Intel for the high-end market was in 2008 and three perhaps most incriminating ly the Intel logo looks suspiciously like the eye of a reptile turned on its side it's time for another razor giveaway and today it's all about the Kraken pro and 7.1 V two headsets from Razer both models include 50 millimeter drivers lightweight frames a headband designed for better weight distribution and less clamping force larger interchangeable ear cushions that are softer and have better sound isolation fully retractable unidirectional microphones and the 7.1 features 7.1 virtual surround sound over its USB connection it's got active noise-cancelling and Razer chroma lighting as well we're giving away five of the pros as well as one 7.1 as part of a six gaming bundle giveaway from Razer enter through the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked do you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider checking out our affiliate code links to where to buy CPUs at Amazon in the video description you can also buy a cool shirt like this one from our merch store or join our forum which is freaking awesome all that is linked down below now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest through the ages or not latest this is the latest the previous one where we looked at CPU water blocks