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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Targon - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
I made a similar comment, Civ6 added a new benchmark with Gathering Storm as well that is even more resource intensive. Turn length will show what your CPU can do, without GPU issues getting in the way.Zoomer - Friday, June 14, 2019 - link
Articles says that bmrk is being developed.nonoverclock - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Interesting article! I'm still sitting on an i7 4770 and am debating an upgrade, would be also interesting to see a Haswell i7 in the mix.HomerrK - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
I'm one of those who bought the 2600K back in the day. A few months ago I made the move to the 9900K. Cores and price don't matter so much as feeling it will be a chip that will offer great bang for the buck for years. I think it is the spiritual successor to the 2600K and that it was a mistake to omit it.RSAUser - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
Not even close, it's near double the price.The Ryzen 2700 at $300 would be a way better "successor" as it's within a lot of people's budgets, offers good gaming performance and with 8 cores is probably going to last quite a while as we move to higher threading.
The Ryzen 2 chips moving to 7nm will probably have the largest leap in a while, so whichever one comes in around the $300 mark will probably be the "true" successor of the 2600K.
Targon - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
The issue that some will have with the 2700X is that the clock speeds are not up there at the 5GHz mark, which is what many Intel systems have been able to hit for over four years now. Third generation Ryzen should get to the 5GHz mark or possibly beyond, so there wouldn't be any compromises. Remember, extra cores will only result in better performance in some areas, but single threaded and many older programs benefit more from higher clock speeds(with similar IPC).Don't get me wrong, I have a Ryzen 7 1800X in this machine and wouldn't step down to a quad-core chip again on the desktop, but I do appreciate that some things just want higher clock speeds. I expect a 40 percent boost in overall performance by switching from this 1800X to the 16 core Ryzen if it hits 5GHz, and that doesn't even count the increase in core count. I may end up paying $600 or more for the CPU though, but that will keep me happy for at least another five years.
crimson117 - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Finally retired my i5-2500K last spring for a Ryzen 2700X.But boy what a good run that CPU had.
jayfang - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Likewise only recently "demoted" my i5-2500K - still has tons of grunt as family PC / HTPCgijames1225 - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Same boat. I used a 2400k and 2500k for my two main PCs for years and years. Just replaced the 2500k with a Ryzen 5 1600 (they were $80 at Microcenter for some blessed reason). Tripling the thread count has down wonders for my compile times, but it's just amazing how strong and long lasting the IPC was on the 2ng generation Core i processors.qap - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
You've convinced me. Staying with my Sandy Bridge for another year. At 1600p difference in CPU is not that high (definitely not worth 1000+ USD for completely new system) and for day to day work it is plenty fast. Up to four threads there's very little to gain and only when more threads are at play there is large enough difference (same goes for Ryzen only there I would gain almost nothing up to four threads).Perhaps Zen 2 will change that, or maybe 10nm CPUs from intel when they finally arrive with new CPU architecture and not rehash of 4 year old Skylake.