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: Far Cry 5
The latest title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration.
Far Cry 5 does support Vega-centric features with Rapid Packed Math and Shader Intrinsics. Far Cry 5 also supports HDR (HDR10, scRGB, and FreeSync 2). We use the in-game benchmark for our data, and report the average/minimum frame rates.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | |||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | High | |
| Far Cry 5 | FPS | Mar 2018 |
DX11 | 720p Low |
1080p Normal |
4K Ultra |
|
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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As with some other titles, there is parity at 4K, but below that resolution there's a large gap between the 2600K and 7700K that an overclock doesn't quite fill.
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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.