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
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 ray traces 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.
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. As browsing moves into a multithreaded arena and web applications get more advanced, it is all the more important to have an appropriate level of performance.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
Google Octane v2
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Flunk - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
DX12 actually uses the CPU more efficiently so it should make every LESS CPU constrained, not more so.willis936 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Well if you want to toss four channels of memory and 28 pcie lanes out the window and just talk about gaming then you should probably keep it in your head that anyone buying these processors over xeons will be overclocking them. You'll likely get identical single threaded performance on the six core parts to the four core parts but just have 2 more cores. If you say more cores doesn't matter in gaming well idk why everyone (including anandtech) is saying this. I play csgo and bf4 @ 1440p120 on a 770/4790k@4.5GHz and while I'm still GPU limited I see all 8 threads get over 70% usage regularly. I have no doubt that even this 4 core single threaded performance king will bottleneck a 1080 in some cases. Intel has slowed down in performance increases and GPUs haven't. The old talk of "you'll always be CPU limited" shouldn't be treated as dogma. Oh and anandtech should consider changing their CPU gaming benchmarks. It's not super helpful to see a bunch of data that shows a dozen CPUs at a dozen scenarios that are all GPU limited. It's not hard to choose realistic CPU limited scenarios.bogda - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
It is difficult now and it has always been difficult finding meaningful, high end, CPU limited gaming benchmarks (unless you are working in Intel marketing/sales). Nobody buys $1000+ processor to run games at 720p.Anybody thinking about buying high end processor for gaming, after seeing meaningful gaming benchmark, should think twice.
P.S. You probably wanted to say "... you will always be GPU limited should not be treated as dogma".
jacklansley97 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
These aren't meant for gamers anyway. HEDT has always been aimed at content creation, development, and calculation. I don't know why anyone thinks it's a revelation that these chips don't perform better than a quad core for gaming.Impulses - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Even then, you need to study your needs carefully... For basic photo/Lightroom tasks clock speed actually matters a decent amount and not a lot of tasks scale super well beyond 4 cores... Obviously for things like video encoding more cores will make a huge difference.joex4444 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
For gaming, no, but that's the thing: PCs can do so much more than just play games.unityole - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
wanted to see more core per core IPC from 6800/6850k vs 4960x and also 5960x vs 6900k. not just because of technology changed also IPC gain from using TB3.0 which probably minimal.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
We covered IPC in both our Broadwell and Skylake mainstream desktop reviews:http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...
landerf - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
That broadwell has edram. This one doesn't.The two things I and a number of others wanted to see from this review were IPC and overclocking for the whole range, as we've already seen from leaks the 10 core was a bad clocker but a lot of people had high hopes for the lower core models.
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
That's a fair point. After Computex blows over I'll look into running Broadwell-E with dual channel memory similar to those tests.