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
Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Ashes: Classic | RTS | Mar 2016 |
DX12 | 720p Standard |
1080p Standard |
1440p Standard |
4K Standard |
|
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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For Ashes we see performance differences between the chips all the way up to 4K, however the 7700K and 2600K overclocked perform almost the same at 4K. From 1440p and down however, the OC doesn't quite make the grade when being put against the 7700K, showing the difference between the two architectures and platforms.
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amrs - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
But what speed of RAM did you stuff it with? Fallout 4 has been shown to benefit from RAM faster than DDR3-1600.Mr Perfect - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
DDR3-1600, as luck would have it. Do you have a link handy for those benchmarks?Hyper72 - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
I'm sitting here with an aging Ivy - 3630QM, that can't be overclocked. I'm really dreaming of an upgrade!eek2121 - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
Wait for AMD then. Apparently (according to AMD) are going to quadruple (at least for Rome, which uses the same Zen 2 architecture) and only half that is core count.Targon - Sunday, May 12, 2019 - link
What many are expecting from Ryzen 3rd generation at this point: a significant IPC boost(anywhere from 10-15 percent), and potentially 5GHz on 8 or even 12 cores. Not enough information to know if the 16 core version will be able to hit 5GHz on all cores or not right now. Considering that Ryzen 2700X is hitting 4.3GHz on 8 cores, 12 cores@5GHz will be a significant boost combined with the IPC improvements as well.May 27th is soon enough to get the official clocks and core counts, and then we get to wait for independent benchmarks on overclocking on X370, X470, and then X570.
Zoomer - Thursday, June 13, 2019 - link
I see I purchased my SB pricematched to MC in 2011 (thanks NCIX! and RIP). Maybe it'll make it a decade. Will give time for DDR5 to mature. Don't want to be stuck on a platform with obsolete DDR4.StevoLincolnite - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
I am running Sandy-Bridge-E... So even less of a need to upgrade... 6-cores, PCI-3.0, Quad-Channel DDR3... Overclocks to 5Ghz if I need...I could upgrade, but I haven't reached a point where it's holding me back yet in gaming.
mode_13h - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
But if something wants AVX2, you're SOL.StevoLincolnite - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
Haven't come across it yet. When that day comes... I imagine it will be the same when I dragged my feet when CPU's with SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and so on came out... I will upgrade when the need arises.mode_13h - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
I think Oculus requires it, as they were fairly explicit in their platform requirements of >= Haswell, which is the first gen with AVX2.