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: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Civilization VI | RTS | Oct 2016 |
DX12 | 1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
8K Ultra |
16K Low |
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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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Civilization is a game that isn't frame rate driven per se, and having all the settings turned up helps a lot. However even at 4K, there's difference in performance between the 2600K and the 7700K when both at stock, which gets halved when the 2600K is overclocked.
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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.