The Intel Core i5-7600K (91W) Review: The More Amenable Mainstream Performer

Legacy and Synthetic Tests

At AnandTech, I’ve taken somewhat of a dim view to pure synthetic tests, as they fail to be relatable. Nonetheless, our benchmark database spans to a time when that is all we had! We take a few of these tests for a pin with the latest hardware.

Cinebench R10

The R10 version of Cinebench is one of our oldest benchmarks, with data going back more than a few generations. The benchmark is similar to that of the newest R15 version, albeit with a simpler render target and a different strategy for multithreading.

With high frequency in tow, the Core i5-7600K matches that of the previous generation i7-6700K, and goes above the Devil’s Canyon i7 as well.

When more threads come to play, the Core i5-7600K sits atop all the other i5 parts, and because hyperthreads have little effect here, the combination of IPC and frequency pushes the Core i5-7600K above previous top performers such as the Core i7-4770K.

Cinebench R11.5

CB11.5 has been popular for many years as a performance test, using easy to read and compare numbers that aren’t in the 1000s. We run the benchmark in an automated fashion three times in single-thread and multi-thread mode and take the average of the results.

Out of the box the i5-7600K hits above a 2.00 on the single threaded test and above 8.00 on the multithreaded test, showing that the scaling with cores on CB11.5 is very reasonable.

7-zip

As an open source compression/decompression tool, 7-zip is easy to test and features a built-in benchmark to measure performance. As a utility, similar to WinRAR, high thread counts, frequency and UPC typically win the day here.

The Core i7-7700K shows the benefits of frequency over a stock i7-6700K, however at the same frequency they perform roughly the same as expected.

POV-Ray

Ray-tracing is a typical multithreaded test, with each ray being a potential thread in its own right ensuring that a workload can scale in complexity easily. This lends itself to cores, frequency and IPC: the more, the better.

AES via TrueCrypt

Despite TrueCrypt no longer being maintained, the final version incorporates a good test to measure different encryption methodologies as well as encryption combinations. When TrueCrypt was in full swing, the introduction of AES accelerated hardware dialed the performance up a notch, however most of the processors (save the Pentiums/Celerons) now support this and get good speed. The built-in TrueCrypt test does a mass encryption on in-memory data, giving results in GB/s.