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
Professional Performance: Windows
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.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is a benchmark based around Cinema 4D, and is fairly well known among enthusiasts for stressing the CPU for a provided workload. Results are given as a score, where higher is better.
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.
Hybrid x265
Hybrid is a new benchmark, where we take a 4K 1500 frame video and convert it into an x265 format without audio. Results are given in frames per second.
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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.