The Intel Broadwell Desktop Review: Core i7-5775C and Core i5-5675C Tested (Part 1)
by Ian Cutress on June 2, 2015 7:45 AM ESTOffice Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can add a wrinkle to testing in environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single-threaded CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
Crystal Well doesn’t help much in Dolphin, indicating it is more CPU frequency limited than DRAM/cache limited.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
WinRAR is our typical benchmark to go to when testing whether DRAM is factor, and the improvements provided by the Crystal Well implementation trump any frequency deficit.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
3DPM, like Dolphin, is concerned more with CPU frequency than DRAM accesses.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
In the webtests, the Broadwell-DT CPUs didn’t necessarily take top spot but they are punching above their expected weight for their frequency.
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MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Simply use something representative of the current situation. Not old numbers which may be totally meaningless today. In Europe we have simple price comparison engines like geizhals.eu where it's really easy to find typical prices. Just exclude obvious outliers and cheap products not yet deliverable and voila, you've got the current street price.nathanddrews - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
In Europe? You mean on the Internet? LOLThere are tons of price comparison websites, but why should AT take the time and be responsible for tracking down pricing when we can all do that in our own areas or from our favorite retailers? They don't know where I like to shop or what currency I use, so it seems like a waste of their time. I'd much rather get quality performance analyses on a more regular basis than have them worry about updating price indexes. Who knows? Maybe their new parent company can do that for them off to the side or something?
MrSpadge - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
I never see people from the US referring to them. They seem to just use Newegg or Amazon. And getting prices for European shops won't do AT any good, as they're mainly writing for the US.And AT has to look up the launch prices of the hardware anyway when they write a review. How much more time would it take to instead look up the current price in a comparison engine? Again, I'm not talking about updating prices dynamically.
I they're not doing this you always get comments like "who in their right mind would buy x? Vendor y must be totally stupid to keep offering this". Simply because the launch price is far higher than the current price.
Senpuu - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
Why should AT take the time, you asked? Well, why should they list a price at all then? Hell, why provide any information to the reader beyond specs and performance metrics? Why even talk about the market at all? There is obviously value to be had in doing so and it comes down to where you draw the line. Whereas you would rather they not 'waste their time', I would rather not waste mine by having to question whether a product is being valued near current market price or some esoteric launch price, and then being forced to google multiple things myself to get a feel for 'real world' prices. No, the price they come to will likely not tell me the exact total of the item in question at whatever preferred retailer a reader happens to use, but it will probably be within 5-10% of that value, which is highly useful for at-a-glance comparisons and understanding where something sits in a market segment.We're not talking about a large amount of effort here, but I'd rather AT do it than myself; it's less effort for them and it benefits a large portion of their readers. Simply provide a disclaimer about the methods used to gather the data as well as a liability warning, and everyone's happy.
Thud2 - Saturday, June 13, 2015 - link
Very good point.yannigr2 - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
There are official price cuts and so you have new OFFICIAL pricing that it is fair to put in the charts. If the launch price of 7850K was $500 and the last official price was $100, wouldn't be the above charts completely misleading? People do have a price/performance ratio in their minds when looking at these charts. In fact for 90% that's the biggest parameter when looking at those charts. And those charts LIE exactly there.manifestation88method - Sunday, September 27, 2020 - link
Nice post https://discoversoulpath.com/yannigr2 - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
You can always take the last OFFICIAL price, but nevermind. It's AMD's pricing that it is wrong anyway. Who cares about poor poor AMD?Gothmoth - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
intel is sitting on it´s laurels because there is no competition.AMD is no competition for poweruser.
users want broadwell..mhm.. aha....
i am the only one who wants intel to make a fast 6 (or better 8) core system without integrated graphics, that runs not to hot and does not cost a fortune?
can´t we have such a CPU for 500-600 euro?
ok then i stick to my OC ivy bridge for a few more years.. and you intel can complain about declining sales.
MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
That's exactly what i7-5820K is for. If it consumes too much power for your taste - well, that's simply the price you have to pay for more cores.