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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Midwayman - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
I think the biggest thing I noticed moving to a 8700k from a 2600k was the same thing I noticed moving from a core 2 duo to a 2600k. Less weird pauses. The 2600k would get weird hitches in games. System processes would pop up and tank the frame rate for an instant, or just an explosion would trigger a physics event that would make it stutter. I see that a lot less with a couple extra cores and some performance overhead.tmanini - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
I agree, the user experience is definitely improved in those ways. Granted, many of us think our time is a bit more important than it likely really is. (does waiting 3 seconds really ruin my day?)ochadd - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
Enjoyed the article very much.Magnus101 - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
You get about 3Xperformance when going from an upclocked 2600k@4.5GHz to a 8700k@4.5GHz when working in DAW:s (Digital Audio Workstation), i.e running dozens and dozens of virtual instruments and plugins when making music.The thing is that it is a combination of applications that:
1. Use all the SSE/AVX or whatever all the streaming extensions that makes parallell flotaing point calculations go much faster. DAW is all about floating point calculations.
2. Are extremely real-time dependent to get ultra low latency (milliseconds in single digits).
This makes even the 7700 k about double in performance in some scenarios when compared to an equally clocked 2600k.
mikato - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
"and Intel’s final quad-core with HyperThreading chip for desktop, the 7700K""the Core i7-7700K, Intel’s final quad-core with HyperThreading processor"
Did I miss some big news?
mapesdhs - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
"... the best chips managed 5.0 GHz or 5.1 GHz in a daily system."Worth noting that with the refined 2700K, *all* of them run fine at 5GHz in a daily system, sensible temps, a TRUE and one fan is plenty for cooling. Threaded performance is identical to a stock 6700K, IPC is identical to a stock 2700X (880 and 177 for CB R15 Nt/1t resp.)
Also, various P67/Z68 mbds support NVMe boot via modded BIOS files. The ROG forum has a selection for ASUS, search for "ASUS bolts4breakfast"; he's added support for the M4E and M4EZ, and I think others asked the same for the Pro Gen3, etc. I'm sure there are equivalent BIOS mod threads for GIgabyte, MSI, etc. My 5GHz 2700K on an M4E has a 1TB SM961 and a 1TB 970 EVO Plus (photo/video archive), though the C-drive is still a venerable Vector 256GB which holds up well even today.
Also, RAM support runs fine with 2133 CL9 on the M4E, which is pretty good (16GB GSkill TridentX, two modules).
However, after using this for a great many years, I do find myself wanting better performance for processing images & video, so I'll likely be stepping up to a Ryzen 3000 system, at least 8 cores.
mapesdhs - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
Forgot to mention, someting else interesting about SB is the low cost of the sibling SB-E. Would be a laugh to see how all those tests pan with with a 3930K stock/oc'd thrown into the mix. It's a pity good X79 boards are hard to find now given how cheap one can get 3930Ks for these days. If stock performance is ok though, there are some cheap Chinese boards which work pretty well, and some of them do support NVMe boot.tezcan - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
I am still running 3930k, prices for it are still very high ~$500. Not much cheaper then what I paid for it in 2011. I am yet to really test my GTX 680's in SLI. Kind of a waste, but they are driving many displays throughout my house. There was an article where some Australian bloke guy runs an 8 core sandy bridge - e (server chip) vs all modern intel 8 core chips. It actually had the lowest latency so was best for pro gamers, lagged a little behind on everything else- but definitely good enough.dad_at - Tuesday, May 14, 2019 - link
I run 3960X at ~ 4 GHz on X79 ASUS P9X79 and have nvme boot drive with modified BIOS. So it is really interesting to compare 2011/2012 6c/12t to 8700K or 9900K. I guess it's about 7700K stock, so modern 4c/8t is like old 6c/12t. Per core perf is about 20-30% up on average and this includes higher frequency ... So IPC is only about 15% up: not impressive. Of course in some loads like AVX2 heavy apps IPC could be 50% up, but such case is not common.martixy - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
Oh man... I just upgraded my 2600K to a 9900K and a couple days later this article drops...The timing is impeccable!
If I ever had a shred of buyer's remorse, the article conclusion eradicated it thoroughly. Give me more FPS.
I saw a screenshot of StarCraft 2. On a mission which I, again, coincidentally (this is uncanny) played today. I can now report that the 9900K can FINALLY feed my graphics card in SC2 properly. With the 2600K I'd be around 20-60 FPS depending on load and intensity of the action. With the new processors, it barely ever drops below 60 and usually hovers around 90FPS. Ingame cinematics also finally run above the "cinematic" 30 FPS I saw on my trusty old 2600K.