The Intel 6th Gen Skylake Review: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTGenerational Tests on the i7-6700K: Legacy, Office and Web Benchmarks
Moving on to the generational tests, and similar to our last Broadwell review I want to dedicate a few pages to specifically looking at how stock speed processors perform as Intel has released each generation. For this each CPU is left at stock, DRAM set to DDR3-1600 (or DDR4-2133 for Skylake in DDR4 mode) and we run the full line of CPU tests at our disposal.
Legacy
Some users will notice that in our benchmark database Bench, we keep data on the CPUs we’ve tested back over a decade and the benchmarks we were running back then. For a few of these benchmarks, such as Cinebench R10, we do actually run these on the new CPUs as well, although for the sake of brevity and relevance we tend not to put this data in the review. Well here are a few of those numbers too.
Even with the older tests that might not include any new instruction sets, the Skylake CPUs sit on top of the stack.
Office Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during 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.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread 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.
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 totalling 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.
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.
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.
Sunspider 1.0.2
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
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DanNeely - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Reliability might start to be a concern in the next year or two. I had a 920 and a 930 (bought right after release and about a year later); but back in June the 920 stopped POSTing. Since I did a precautionary upgrade to a 4790K at the start of the year it didn't impact me; and I haven't gotten around to doing any part swaps to figure out which component failed yet. (Not so I can buy a replacement part; but so I know what's potentially usable as a spare if/when the 930 does the same.)06GTOSC - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Looks to me that I'm not missing anything for gaming by staying with my 4790k.nmm - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Well, that was a bit underwhelming. Fantastic article, of course, but I can't agree that this is a nail in the coffin for Sandy Bridge. For myself, I think I'll just upgrade the cooler on my i7 2600k and bump the multiplier up a few notches and hold out for another year. When there are some reasonably cheap NVME options and affordable/fast high capacity DDR4 modules and Pascal GPU's, that will probably be the right time for me to break up with Sandy.piroroadkill - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Definitely not the nail in the coffin for Sandy, far from it.In games, there's still no point to upgrading..
Jon Tseng - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
TBH I'm not missing anything staying with my QX6850! (65nm FTW). GPU is all that matters nowadays...postem - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
That was my doubt when i was up to wait 6 months or get DC to replace old 950. The difference is mainly negligible from DC, but there will be much more costly due to new mobos, DDR4 and so on.kenansadhu - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
Were you really thinking about upgrading to skylake when you bought your 4790k?Refuge - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I wanna know whats going on under the hood. Can't wait for the follow up article.Otherwise I'm disappointed, if you claim this is the end for Sandybridge, then anyone who agree's and is upgrading lemme know, I'll gladly take your old hardware for cheap.
With this performance I'd be happier buying a Devilscanyon for less and wait for Intel to actually give me something worth spending $220+ on.
Skylake, I am very disappoint.
otimus - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Says "Sandy Bridge, your time is up" proceeds to practically show data as to why it is not. Especially for gaming.Do you guys just not live in reality, or does getting things for free just flat out cloud your mind to the staggering cost it'd take to go from Sandy Bridge to Skylake for what seems like a very few FPS? Even worse, I imagine most folks are still on 60 Hz monitors.
Refuge - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I have a lot of respect for you Ian, but I completely disagree that Sandy's time is up, and if it is? Skylake isn't the cause. This is such a terrible release haha. I hope it is just some launch kinks that need ironed out.Otherwise Devils Canyon is where its at. Older gen so it is cheaper, and it is more compelling than this slab of silicon. Other than increased iGPU performance with DDR4 memory, there isn't a single gain I saw in any of these benchmarks that is noticeable to an end user.