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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wishgranter - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Ian, for the overclocking lok here. a better ES samplehttp://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/core_i7_6700k...
Khenglish - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
It's a shame this doesn't have the 128MB L4 cache. It obviously helps Broadwell over Haswell in CPU benchmarks. If Skylake had it it'd be a clear and very significant upgrade over Haswell, but without it it's just too minor to warrant an upgrade over Haswell or Ivy Bridge.Brazos - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Is this what happens when AMD stops being a competitor?And I agree with the comments about the IGPU. Most enthusiasts will purchase a graphics card. Save money, space etc by dropping it.
Jumangi - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Welcome back to the early 2000's when Intel could put out miniscule upgrades while charging premium prices because of the lack of any real competition.A 25% increase over a 4 year old CPU...pathetic.
Gigaplex - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
AMD was very competitive early 2000s.zodiacfml - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
Hmm, you kind have a point. Though Intel is relentless with innovation as to chase their dreams on mobile and server market, Skylake architecture seems optimized for server/computing applications. I think it has been that way for many years already. Maybe, the overclocking support Intel is giving to enthusiast is a sign of this. If AMD were competitive, Intel wouldn't have to optimize too much on the server/computing performance.I'm baffled, there's obvious IPC increase and massive improvements in multithreading/Handbrake, but doesn't show in games. With DX12, I doubt it will help.
Eidorian - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I am frankly looking at Skylake for the platform as a whole. The improvements between generations are not amazing and disconcerting for gaming but I am coming from a Lynnfield + P55 system built in 2009. This is going to be great for me. I can still see users on Sandy Bridge + P67 holding on to those systems a little longer.postem - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I was reluctant to upgrade to devils canyon, from 950 Bloomfield due to this 6 month proximity to skylake.I never had severe performance issues with the 950 @ 4.2 Ghz, but since i started to use a 980 i saw the frames consistently dropped below.
When i finally updated to 4790K, man it was good. Not only better response on overall processing, better frames, much faster in all aspects.
Bottom line: i dont think you need to upgrade each generation. I would gladly gone to Haswell-E if it wasnt so $$$, but anyway, DC is giving me a hell of performance, and i dont think its worth considering to ugrade it to skylake. It just sucks intel changed the whole socket because of a pin.
If you are comming from a 3-4 generations before, you will really see the benefits from the upgrade i can assure you. I cant say its the end of Sandy Bridge, but its coming to its age.
What really is getting nice is to have good cpus with minimal TDP on laptops. You can have a broadwell i5 with low as 10W consumption.
MrSpadge - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Ian, could you please undervolt the chips? I know you reported 1.20 v at 4.3 GHz as "undervolting", but that's far more than I'd give even a 32 nm CPU and is just considered low because the stock voltage is so insanely high. Give us a few more data points until about 4.0 GHz, please.Flunk - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I've got a 2500K overclocked to 4.4Ghz @ 1.2v.