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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semyon95 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
DDR4 is completely useless and it will stay useless for a whileVlad_Da_Great - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
DDR4 should be replaced with 3XP. The new memory from INTC/MU JV. Intel has foreseen that and perhaps next year CPUs models will have huge leap in performance.boeush - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
3dXP is much faster than NAND, but still nowhere near as fast as DRAM. So it will never replace DDR.boeush - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
DDR4 is useless at 2133. It won't be quite as useless once 4000+ becomes the affordable norm. It'll take a year or two, but come 2017-18, DDR3 will be a clear-cut dinosaur. Of course, by then HBM 2 and maybe even 3 might be a compelling alternative - if not an upgradeable one...jjj - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Great , now cut the GPU and sell it at 60-80$ and it's all good.Until then, this is one of the biggest ripoffs in tech.
They do this instead of making a 60mm2 chip (without a GPU) that would cost them 10-20$ depending on yields and could easily retail well bellow 100$ even with their obscene margins. They just add bloat, in fact most of the chip is bloat, just to make it look like you are getting something worth paying for.
richardginn - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Why cut 80 bucks off it??? The broadwell i7-5775c CPU has GT3e graphics on it and would destroy the crap out of this Skylake CPU for Integrated graphics performance.Skylake is a full on total flop right now!!
Bambooz - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Except noone gives two sh*ts about integrated graphics when buying an i7..8steve8 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I doTeknobug - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Unless it's in a mini PC type thing like the Gigabyte BRIX or Alienware Alpha. But no I don't buy i7's for its integrated GPU, just gonna say that high end CPU's shouldn't even include iGPU.nikaldro - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
Still, the L4 cache can be useful, and DX12 could make use of both the GPU and iGPU to give better results.I mean, you're charging us 350 bucks, and I want the absolute cutting edge for that much, considering that by next year its 6 core counterpart will cost just a bit more, I think I'll just wait for the skylake E parts