The Intel Broadwell-E Review: Core i7-6950X, i7-6900K, i7-6850K and i7-6800K Tested
by Ian Cutress on May 31, 2016 2:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Enterprise
- Prosumer
- X99
- 14nm
- Broadwell-E
- HEDT
Office Performance: Extreme Editions
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high-performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Agisoft Photoscan – 2D to 3D Image Manipulation: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
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nevcairiel - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Even if it is, its like 2 years and 2 generations late to the party then. By the time Zen is out, we have Kaby Lake, and they advertise being on-par with not the current, not the previous, but one gen even before that?Spunjji - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
Their claims (if true) would signify rough IPC parity with Broadwell, which Skylake outclasses by a mighty 2.3% according to this site. That was in turn a staggering 3.3% over Haswell so even matching that won't leave them far off the mark. We have no reason to suppose the Kaby Lake release will alter than pattern substantially.It's all big ifs, though, and of course it'll be compared to whatever's out when it finally arrives.
Flunk - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
We can hope I guess, I gave up hope long ago.maxxcool - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
If you are buying a 8 core cpu from EITHER vendor specifically 'game on' your a proper idiot, tool and dumbass.JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
If you are telling people what they can and can't do with their money along with slinging personal attacks, you're a proper idiot, tool, and you need to get a job so you can manage your own money, rather than someone else's.Seriously though. This is the internet. You should really stop caring about what other people spend their own money on. People much richer than these kids are spending money on sports cars and getting into a wreck a week later, often involving other vehicle(s) and/or innocent people.
I really couldn't care less if 10,000 people on this article's comments section thought the new extreme edition processor was a "good value" and bought one (or more). More power to them.
hoohoo - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
AMD is not a charity.AMD will charge as much as the market will bear.
Ninety percent of the performance probably costs about ninety percent the price.
Michael Bay - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
>supposed to be>Zen
At this point in time it`s not even remotely funny anymore.
Bulat Ziganshin - Saturday, June 4, 2016 - link
>Zen is supposed to be really, really close to Broadwell in IPC.are you really believe that AMD, who was a lot behind Intel back in 2008, and then lost a few years on Bulldozer development, in a miraculous way will jump over? i expect that Zen will be a little better than their last Phenom, and that their first implementation of SMT will be as inefficient as Nehalem one. And higher core count, as well as AMD huge lag in lowering-heat-dissipation technologies, will mean more heat and therefore stricter limits on frequency - the same limits as in 10-core Broadwell and probably even stricter. So it may be like 8-core Nehalem at 4 GHz (with best overclocking). That's better than i7-6700K for multi-threaded tasks, but of course slower for tasks with 1-4 threads, including most of games. Or you may continue to believe in Santa :)
jchambers2586 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
you spend $434 on a CPU and it does not perform than a $ 250 6600K in gaming you would think spending more would get you better gaming performance. I don't' think spending $434 on the i7-6800K is worth it for gaming.beginner99 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
This is the take-away. Useless for gaming for now. If 6-cores will actually benefit from DX12 remains to be seen. If I were I game developer I would focus on making use of the iGPU versus scaling above 4-cores because most of my user base has an idling iGPU and very few more than 4 cores.If it would at least have edram. For broadwell it's 5775c or else skylake for gaming.