Upgrading from an Intel Core i7-2600K: Testing Sandy Bridge in 2019
by Ian Cutress on May 10, 2019 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Overclocking
- 7700K
- Coffee Lake
- i7-2600K
- 9700K
CPU Performance: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
We can see the sizeable difference in performance between the 7700K and the 2600K, coming from microarchitecture updates and frequency, however even overclocking the 2600K only halves that gap.
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
Similarly with Blender, the overclock only cuts the defecit in half between the 2600K and 7700K at stock performance. Add in an overclock to the 7700K, and that gap gets wider.
LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths
As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
POV-Ray is a little different, just because AVX2 is playing a part here in how well the newer processors perform. POV-Ray also prefers cores over threads, so having eight real cores means the 9700K gets a nice big lead.
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cwolf78 - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Is there any way you can do a similar comparison with the i5 CPUs? I have a 3570k OC to 4.2 GHz and its starting to struggle in some games. E.g., I can get over 60 fps in AC Odyssey for the most part, but there's all sorts of annoying spikes where the min FPS will tank for whatever reason. I'm running a GTX 970 that's OC'ed pretty close to a 980 and I don't know if it would be worth upgrading that or if my CPU would strangle anything faster. Also, whats the performance difference between an OC 3570k and a OC 3770k in modern games?RSAUser - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
This is mostly due to being 4 threads, that's also why I wouldn't go with anything <8 threads as you'll see it happen more and more as we all move to higher core counts.Plus Ubisoft has probably got the buggiest/worst optimized games, last one I can think of that was all right was Black Flag, mostly because they didn't change the engine and just changed the story line/map.
uibo - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
At what voltage did you run the 2600k?abufrejoval - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
I owned pretty much every iteration of Intel and AMD since the 80286. I pushed them all on relatives and friends to make space for the next iteration.But everything since Sandy Bridge stuck around, both because there was no reason to move them out and I had kids to serve. Mine was a 2600 no-K, because I actually wanted to test VT-d and for that you needed to use a Q-chipset and -K was not supported.
Still drives the gaming rig of one of my sons, while another has the Ivy Bridge (K this time but not delivering beyond 4 GHz). Got Haswell Xeons, 4 and 18 core, a Broadwell as Xeon-D 8 Core, Skylake in notebooks and Kaby Lakes i7-7700K in workstations and an i7-7700T in a pfSense.
Those newer i7s were really just replacing AMDs and Core-2 systems being phased out over time, not because I was hoping for extra performance: AT made it very clear for years, that that simply won’t happen anymore with silicon physics.
What I really wanted from Intel, more cores instead of a useless iGPU, more PCIe lanes, more memory channels I eventually got all from the e5-2696v3 I scored for less than $700 on eBay.
Zen simply came a little too late, a couple of Phenom II x4-6 and three generations of APUs taught me not to expect great performance nor efficiency from AMD, but at least they were budget and had become reliable (unlike the K2-K3+s).
With the family all settled and plenty of systems in all sizes and shapes the only reason to buy CPU any time soon would be to replace failed parts. And fail they just don’t, at least not the CPUs.
And then I must have 100GB or so in DDR3, which I really don't buy again as DDR4 or 5. DDR3-2400 is really just fine with Kaby Lakes.
I overclocked a bit here and there, mostly out of curiosity. But I got bitten far to often with reliability issues, when I was actually working on the machines and not playing around, so I keep them very close to stock for years now: And then it’s simply not worth the trouble, because the GPU/SSD/RAM is far more important or nothing will help anyway (Windows updates…).
Nice write-up, Ian, much appreciated and not just because it confirms my own impressions.
WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Nice reply. Thanks. My 2600k is just cranking along as my darknet browsing machineRSAUser - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
The Zen chips actually have pretty good efficiency, I was expecting way worse before it came out since AMD hadn't been competitive in years. Zen 2 will be quite interesting, mostly due to the node shrinkage hopefully bringing way lower power envelopes and maybe cheaper CPUs, since we all need that saving for the mess that the GPU market has become.Targon - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
Don't discount the significant IPC improvements that are expected from the third generation Ryzen processors(not the APUs which are Zen+ based from what I have read).evilspoons - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Still have a 2600k at 4.6 GHz with proper turbo support (slows down when idle). Went from GTX 680s in SLI to a single GTX 1080 and it plays most games just fine.That being said I'd love to throw in a Ryzen 7 2700X but only if one of you pays for it... 😁
rocky12345 - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Nice flash back review thank you. I am still on a i7 2600K@5.1GHz with 32GB DDR3@2400MHz and very tight timings. It took a while to dial in the memory since Sandy does not really support this speed gracefully like it's newer brothers & sisters do. I have 2 Samsung 512GB SSD drives in raid zero so plenty fast for windows drive and some games installed as well as 2 4TB 7200RPM hard drives.I think some of the issues you were having with the OC 4.7GHz was probably do to either memory not 100% stable or the CPU may have just been at the edge of stable because it probably wanted just a tad bit more voltage. on my system I had random problems when it was new due to memory timings and finding just the right voltage for the CPU. After getting all of that dialed in my system is pretty much 100% stable with 5.1GHz and DDR3@2400MHz and has been running this way since 2011.
So going from these charts for the gaming results & mine at 5.1GHz would place my system faster than the i7 7700K stock and a slightly over clocked one as well. Though I am 100% sure a i7 7700K fully overclocked would get better FPS since their IPC is like what 10%-12% better than a Sandy clock for clock and then if you throw in AVX2 My Sandy would get hammered.
I am going to be upgrading my system this summer not because I feel my system is slow but more because I know because of it's age that something could fail such as main board or CPU and it would be costly to try to replace either of those so time for the big upgrade soon. I probably will move this system to do secondary duties and have it as a back up gaming system or there for my friends to use when we get to together for a gaming session. I have not fully decided which way to go but am leaning towards maybe AMD Ryzen with Zen 2 and at least 8/16 CPU and maybe a 12/24 CPU if they release more than 8 cores on the main stream desktops.
isthisavailable - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Still running a i5 3450. Runs fine and maintains 60 FPS for 95% of the time.