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: Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Open World | Apr 2015 |
DX11 | 720p Low |
1080p High |
1440p Very 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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We see performance parity between the chips at 4K, but for all other resolutions and settings, the OC chip again still can't make it to the level of the 7700K, often sitting midway between the 7700K at stock and the 2600K at stock.
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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.