The Intel 6th Gen Skylake Review: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTWhat You Can Buy: Windows Professional Performance
Agisoft Photoscan – 2D to 3D Image Manipulation: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is a benchmark based around Cinema 4D, and is fairly well known among enthusiasts for stressing the CPU for a provided workload. Results are given as a score, where higher is better.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Hybrid x265
Hybrid is a new benchmark, where we take a 4K 1500 frame video and convert it into an x265 format without audio. Results are given in frames per second.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
477 Comments
View All Comments
Sunburn74 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Still not budging from my 2600K. There is no evidence of real world benefit of an PCIE drive compared to a sata drive. As for the CPUs, the 25% gain IS impressive considering the short time period it has been accomplished in but is just within the threshold of noticeability. Would prefer to wait till maybe 50% gain or when software really starts to take advantage of SSDs.Pneumothorax - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
You're giving Intel too much slack here. Even the much maligned P4 generations had a 50% improvement in raw speed in 2 years. We've waited almost 4 years for only 25%. What's crazy is it cost Intel billions of R&D for it.heffeque - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
25% in 4 yeas... but their iGPU now has more Dx12 Tier 3 support than nVidia and AMD.Nagorak - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Unfortunately, no serious gamer will ever use it.Bambooz - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
"in my experience all computers are a bit unstable"in other words: you've been buying shitty components :)
kmmatney - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
OK, come on! You bought a "K" cpu - it's meant to overclock - at least bump it up to 4.2-4.3 Ghz - it will run that without any voltage increase. In fact, most motherboards (mine included) seem to overvolt Devil's Canyon cpus, even at stock voltage. In fact, you can probably undervolt it, and overclock it at the same time, as Anandtech did here:You have a guide handed to you for overclocking this cpu:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-r...
My Z97 PC-Mate motherbard was setting my i5 4690K at 1.2V while at stock, which is higher than it needs - it can run at 4.5Ghz at that setting!
IUU - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
I agree with the upgrading part.But not quite with the 25% IPC increase. 25% is awesome.
Two important things:1. It carries the burden of a useless gpu. It could either consume
less energy or the same with more cores. At least then you would use the cpu
where possible for what it's meant to be used.
2. the 25 % increase is the "real" world performance. Unfortunately the "real" world is terribly
slow to take advantages of the improvement Intel introduces with the new instruction sets.
So while it's good to stay down to earth to the "real" world performance, it would be nice to have also a mention of the theoretical improvements of the cpu.
icebox - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I still don't see the reason to upgrade from a 2600k even though I really urge to upgrade my hardware :) I really don't care about integrated graphics and I'm pretty sure 80% buyers of i7 k parts don't either.There was no reason when ivy brought 5 percent, haswell another 10% and devil 5% more. Now it's a total of 25%. I want more from a total platform change - I moved from 755 to 1155 for a lot more than that. Mainly I want more than 16 PCI lanes, I understand they'll never give us more than 4 cores because xeon and E series.
euler007 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Same here, I'm always waiting every generation upgrade my OC'ed 2500k, but I mainly use my home rig for gaming and these benchmarks give me no reason to upgrade. Maybe Skylake-E.moerg - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
so DDR4 offers nothing in gaming?