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: Strange Brigade (DX12)
Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.
The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark which offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. AMD has boasted previously that Strange Brigade is part of its Vulkan API implementation offering scalability for AMD multi-graphics card configurations.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Strange Brigade | FPS | Aug 2018 |
DX12 | 720p Low |
1080p Medium |
1440p High |
4K Ultra |
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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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On Strange Bridgade, all the chips (apart from 2600K at stock) perfom the same at 1080p and above, meaning that there's no reason to upgrade if this is the only title you play.
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RSAUser - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
10nm Intel desktop is earliest 2021 or so probably, wouldn't bother holding out for that.PeachNCream - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
The only reason why I upgraded from a Sandy Bridge laptop to a Haswell-U laptop was because it was $30 cheaper to get a refurb PC with Windows 10 preloaded than it was to just buy a Windows 10 Pro license for my Sandy Bridge system so I could finally get off WIndows 7. Oddly enough, I spend more time on my Sandy Bridge laptop after moving it to Linux Mint than I do on the newer Windows 10 laptop. The Haswell-U is simply here for a handful of things that I can't do in Linux which are mainly a few games lacking a Linux version that are iffy or uncooperative in WINE. It really had nothing at all do do with a lack of compute power and more to do with EOL on 7. I'd argue that these days, pretty much any Sandy or newer system is adequate from a compute power perspective for most mundane chores and a number of heavy lift tasks.29a - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
You can buy a Win Pro license for about $7, I've done it multiple times.MDD1963 - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
sounds real 'legit', does it not?29a - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
They're legit, they activate. They just come from the grey market.BushLin - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
You can still take the free upgrade from Win 7 to Windows 10, Microsoft never stopped this from working. Do one upgrade the dirty way, get activated and future clean installs will activate too.Targon - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
You could have thrown a Windows 10 flash drive in there and upgraded your Windows 7 to 10 for free.Irata - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Thanks for the article - it is really interesting.I think it shows very well why the PC market was stagnant for a long time. Depending on ones use case, the only upgrade that seems worth while is going from the top Early 2011 4C CPU to the top late 2018 8C consumer CPU.
I would love to see a similar article comparing the top of the line GPU with the 2600k in this time frame to see what performance difference a GPU upgrade made and contrast this with a CPU upgrade.
siberian3 - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
I am running a 2600k at stock on 16 gig 1333 ram ddr3 and dont plan to upgrade until mobos with ddr5 and pci express 4 i only play 1080p anyway so thats enough for me i guess29a - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I've been wanting to read something like this for a while.