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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Chaser - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
Now even more pleased with my 5820K rig I bought two months ago.Artas1984 - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
I disagree with the statement that Skylake should now be a definitive replacement for Sandy Bridge.It's like saying that your game runs at 200 FPS slowly, so now you have to upgrade to get 250 FPS. Of course i am not talking about games directly, it's a metaphor, but you get the point.
Also with the way how fast computer electronics develop, people are "forced" to up their quality of life at the expense of buying more important things in this short fu+kin life. Just because there are things manufactured does not mean you have to live someone else's life! I for one give a shit about smart phones and will never use them anyway, i will never use 3D googles or monitors in movies or gaming just because they exist.
On top of that:
AMD's chips have not yet reached the performance levels of Sandy Bridge. The piece of crap FX 9590 falls behind 2600K in every multi-threaded bench and get's beaten by 2500K in every game!
Oxford Guy - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Take a look at this: http://www.techspot.com/review/1006-the-witcher-3-...Oxford Guy - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
It seems there's a reason why Anandtech never puts the FX chips into its charts and instead chooses the weak APUs... Is it because the FX is holding its own nicely now that games like Witcher 3 are finally using all of its threads?Oxford Guy - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
A 2012 chip priced as low as $100 (8320E) with a $40 motherboard discount (combo with UD3P set me back a total of $133.75 with tax from Microcenter a few months ago) is holding its own with i7 chips when overclocked, and at least i5s. Too bad for AMD that they released that chip so many years before the gaming industry would catch up. Imagine if it was on 14nm right now instead of 32.boeush - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Oh yeah, real impressive: FX 9590 @ 4.7 Ghz is a whole 1% faster than the 4 year old i5 2500K @ 3.3 Ghz. I'm blown away... Particularly since the 9590 overclocks to maybe 5 Ghz if you are lucky, at 200 W with water cooling, while the 2500K overclocks to 4.5 Ghz on air. And it's not as if that game isn't GPU limited like most of the others...Fanboi, please.
Oxford Guy - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
You're missing the point completely, but that's OK. Anyone who looks at the charts can figure it out for themselves, as the reviewer noted. Also, if you would have taken the time to look at that page before spouting off nonsense, you would have noticed that a high clock rate is not necessary for that chip to have decent performance -- negating the entire argument that extreme overclocking is needed. The game clearly does a better job of load balancing between the 8 threads than prior games have, resulting in a much more competitive situation for the FX (especially the 8 thread FX).As for being a fanboy. A fanboy is someone who won't put in an FX and instead just puts in a bunch of weaker APUs, the same thing that has been happening in multiple reviews. Name-calling is not a substitute for actually looking at the data I cited and responding to it accurately.
Markstar - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
I totally agree - looking at the numbers it is very obvious to me that upgrading is not worth it unless you are heavily into video encoding. Especially for gaming, spending the money on a better graphic card is clearly the better investment as the difference is usually between 1-3%.My i5-2500K is "only" at 4.5GHz and I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon, though I have put some money aside for exactly that purpose.
sonny73n - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
I don't agree with your bold statement: "Sandy Bridge, your time is up". Why do you even compare Skylake and SB K series at their stock speeds? I have my i5-2500K at 4.2GHz now with Prime95 stress test max temp at 64C on air cool. I can easily clock it to 4.8GHz and I have so but never felt the need for that high of clocks. With ~25% overall system improvement in benchmarks and only 3 to 5% in games, this upgrade doesn't justify the cost of a new MB, DDR4 and CPU. I'm sure a few people can utilize this ~25% improvement but I doubt it would make any difference for me on my daily usage. Secondly, Skylake system alone can't run games. Why upgrade my SB when it can run all the games with Evga 780 that I wanted it to? For gamers, wouldn't it be a lot wiser and cheaper to spend on another 780 instead of spending on a new system? And all that upgrade cost is just for 3 to 5% improvement in games? Sorry, I'll pass.MrSpadge - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Ian, when testing the memory scaling or comparing DDR3 and 4 you shouldn't underclock the CPUs. Fixing their frequency is good, but not reducing it. The reason: at lower clock speeds the throughput is reduced, which in turn reduces the need for memory bandwidth. At 3 vs. 4 GHz we're already talking about approximately 75% the bandwidth requirement that a real user would experience. In this case memory latency still matters, of course, but the advantage of higher bandwidth memory is significantly reduced.