Why an Overclockable Core i3 Might Not Exist: The Supermicro C7H170-M and Intel Core i3-6100TE Review
by Ian Cutress on March 17, 2016 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Motherboards
- Core i3
- Supermicro
- Overclocking
Office Performance
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.
Dolphin loves single threaded performance, and got a big boost when Haswell was introduced. The overclock puts it within spitting distance of a few i7 parts, and comfortably above the lower clocked i5 processors.
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.
Being a variable threaded workload, the 6100TE gains some benefit with an overclock but is still behind the true quad core parts. This is most likely due to cache contention on the hyperthreads.
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.
For the single threaded test, similarly to the G3258 when overclocked, the frequency and architecture make a big difference. In the multithreaded test, the Core i3-6100TE when overclocked starts to play with the i5 parts.
3D Particle Movement v2.0 beta-1
I am in the process of updating the 3DPM benchmark, and you can follow the progress with source code and files in this thread on our forums. It was pointed out that the original code, while written under the naivety of a chemist rather than a non-computer scientist, might have some rough time with a phenomenon called false sharing which seems to affect low-cache AMD processors more than Intel processors (but both get a big increase in performance). The software is currently in the beta phase, with the core algorithms in place, but to showcase the difference we ran it on a few processors.
For an upcoming review with AMD Carrizo, we see some interesting results with this new version of 3DPM.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
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nathanddrews - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Predicating the value of i3 overclocking as a whole on the 6100TE is absurd, don't you think? The 35% OC of the 6100TE is still slower than the base clock speed of the vanilla 6100 (3.7GHz), which when OCed over 4.2GHz offers a tremendous value. For the same price - why on earth would you buy the much slower 35W variant if your goal is overclocking?http://ark.intel.com/compare/90729,88181
From the standpoint of motherboard/BIOS SKYOC availability alone I would agree that the case is now somewhat moot, but I think the case that has already been made months ago by DigitalFoundry and others is that the SKYOC i3 (normal i3 CPUs that you can buy) makes a very strong value. It's a shame that mobo vendors caved so quickly.
dualsmp - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
I suspect politics is a work here. Also, the conclusion would be more clear cut with the 6100 rather than a bit nebulous with the 6100TE.Remember how fast Intel shutdown overclocking after the Clarkdale i3? When the Clarkdale i3 was overclocked it was nipping at the heels of Intel's more expensive parts at the time. The Clarkdale i3 offered too much value for the money when overclocked, so Intel had to shut it down.
ImSpartacus - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
You're probably right about the politics. It's a shame, but Anandtech is probably under Intel's finger.alistair.brogan - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Is there hope for an AMD Zen dual core that will overclock? That's all I'd recommend for people :)ImSpartacus - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link
If zen is only 40% better ipc than excavator, then it won't be leading Intel and amd will still need high clocks compete. So I would bet that the stock zen parts might be using up a fair bit of that overclocking headroom.alistair.brogan - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
I think a properly overclockable i3 would hit 4.5ghz, just like an i5 can, so imagine the results in that case. It wouldn't "maybe" be worth it, it would absolutely by awesome. Which is why Intel doesn't allow it..... don't want people buying 4.5ghz i3's and saying good bye to the expensive i5sdragosmp - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review, it's a good reference point.I thought at some point the lowest end Xeon v5 (4C/8T) was quite a bit cheaper than the 6700K and much more available. If that could be OCed, and I think some motherboards like Gigabyte's Cxxx say they could, that would have been the fastest CPU while keeping some money in the pocket.
Agreed with getting older and putting a higher value on our time, but if my kid decides to leave me alone for a while I still like to tinker with OCing
Samus - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link
It's true Xeon's are usually priced between the i-series and i-series k equivalents (there are i5 and i7 based Xeon's) so it would be cheaper than a "k" part while giving you ECC and full vPro support, not to mention Xeon's appear to have soldered heatspreaders when starting with Ivy Bridge, everything but Xeon's were shipped with pretty subpar TIM/paste. That only slightly improved with Devils Canyon...they still weren't fused lid-to-die like a Xeon.There are a few theories why Intel uses solder on Xeon CPU's. One is obviously temperature and 24/7 consistency. The most plausible reason, though, is the weight and pressure of server cooling solutions (compared to most OEM PC coolers and water blocks. I weighed a tiny 1U Xeon cooler once. This thing was like 20mm tall, and it still weighed 870 grams. That's 2 lbs! Pure block of copper fins. Tightened down to 25Nm and exposed to the pressure, vibration and temperatures of a 1U environment for years, you can take a guess why Intel makes the Xeon lids more durable.
extide - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Please do that future piece, anyone who is seriously considering doing this will definitely not be sing the T or TE series chips, and as you mentioned you can't even really get them in the retail market. I would really like to see what a 4.4-4.6Ghz i3 can do.LostWander - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
The idea is to show how close to i5 performance you can get while paying the price of an i3. Although it would be interesting to see how well the i5 overclocks too so we can see how close to K performance we can get for a non-k price.