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: Gaming Benchmarks on High End GPUs
Alien: Isolation
If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled.
For low end graphics, we test at 720p with Ultra settings, whereas for mid and high range graphics we bump this up to 1080p, taking the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.
Total War: Attila
The Total War franchise moves on to Attila, another The Creative Assembly development, and is a stand-alone strategy title set in 395AD where the main story line lets the gamer take control of the leader of the Huns in order to conquer parts of the world. Graphically the game can render hundreds/thousands of units on screen at once, all with their individual actions and can put some of the big cards to task.
For low end graphics, we test at 720p with performance settings, recording the average frame rate. With mid and high range graphics, we test at 1080p with the quality setting. In both circumstances, unlimited video memory is enabled and the in-game scripted benchmark is used.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. For low end systems we test at 720p on the lowest settings, whereas mid and high end graphics play at 1080p with very high settings across the board. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).
GRID: Autosport
No graphics tests are complete without some input from Codemasters and the EGO engine, which means for this round of testing we point towards GRID: Autosport, the next iteration in the GRID and racing genre. As with our previous racing testing, each update to the engine aims to add in effects, reflections, detail and realism, with Codemasters making ‘authenticity’ a main focal point for this version.
GRID’s benchmark mode is very flexible, and as a result we created a test race using a shortened version of the Red Bull Ring with twelve cars doing two laps. The car is focus starts last and is quite fast, but usually finishes second or third. For low end graphics we test at 1080p medium settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get the full 1080p maximum. Both the average and minimum frame rates are recorded.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
The final title in our testing is another battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Shadow of Mordor. Produced by Monolith using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity to a large extent, despite having to be cut down from the original plans. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
For testing purposes, SoM gives a dynamic screen resolution setting, allowing us to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. As a result, we get several tests using the in-game benchmark. For low end graphics we examine at 720p with low settings, whereas mid and high end graphics get 1080p Ultra. The top graphics test is also redone at 3840x2160, also with Ultra settings, and we also test two cards at 4K where possible.
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boeush - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
A good point, but I think you missed this page in the review:http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...
The other pages where all CPUs are normalized to 3 Ghz are for generational IPC comparison, not memory scaling. The later "what you can buy" pages repeat all the same tests but with all CPUs at full default clocks, as well - to gauge the combined effect of IPC and frequency scaling across generations.
Still missing and hopefully to be addressed in a future follow-up, is a study of generational overclocked performance, and performance under DDR4 frequency scaling with and without CPU (other than memory) overclocking.
MrSpadge - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Well, on the page before the one you linked Ian says:"For these tests, both sets of numbers were run at 3.0 GHz with hyperthreading disabled. Memory speeds were DDR4-2133 C15 and DDR3-1866 C9 respectively."
I think this applies to both memory scaling pages.
You've got a good point, though, that the "what you can buy" section compares DDR4-2133 and DDR3-1600 (latency unspecified) at default CPU clocks. And from a quick glance the differences there are not that different from the ones obtained in the dedicated memory scaling section.
Nutti - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Left out all the AMD FX processors? Looks pretty bad for AMD this way. FX is still much better than 7870K. Zen will nicely catch up with Intel. AMD needs 40% improvement over FX8350 and they will sure get that through better IPC and multithreading.Bambooz - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Wishful thinking from a fanboiOxford Guy - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Ad hominem isn't a rebuttal, bud.Oxford Guy - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
The FX does nicely in a modern game like Witcher 3 that uses all of its threads as can be seen here: http://www.techspot.com/review/1006-the-witcher-3-...Anandtech has been doing the "let's throw in a dozen APUs and completely ignore FX" for some time now. The only thing it accomplishes is obscuring the fact that the FX can be a better value for a workstation (rendering and such) that also has some gaming requirements.
nils_ - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
You probably should have run the Linux Tests through Phoronix Test Suite, the Linux Bench seems rather outdated with Ubuntu 11.04 (we are on 15.04 now).eeessttaa - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Great article as always. I wish intel would leave the fivr in it. i know how hot it got but instead of removing it they should've improved on its design.Nelviego - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Seems it might finally be time to OC my i7 2600k and give it another 4 1/2 years. ;)Oxford Guy - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
Intel made everyone think Skylake was going to be a massive improvement on all fronts. Massive IPC increase. Massive technological advance. People shilled for Intel by claiming it was highly likely that Skylake wouldn't need a new socket and would just use LGA 2011-3.Instead, we get ... what? Chips that aren't significantly better than Haswells, let alone Broadwell?
I guess Intel is sandbagging even more than usual since AMD isn't doing anything new on the CPU front. So much for all of the intense Skylake hype. It amazes me, too, how people are blithely now saying "I guess I'll wait for Kaby Lake" -- the same people, often enough, who said Skylake would revolutionize computing.
It looks like this is what happens when Intel has minimal competition. The FX chips are still clinging to relevance now that consoles have 8 threads and weak individual cores (not that you'd know it based on the way this site never puts even one of them into its reviews in favor of weaker APUs) -- and because rendering programs like Blender can use their threads which can make them a decent value for budget workstation use, but their design is from 2012 or so. Overclocking is also keeping old chips like the 2500K viable for gaming.
I admit I feel for the hype a bit. I was expecting at least some sort of paradigm-shifting new tech. Instead... I don't see anything impressive at all. A new socket... a small gain in efficiency... rinse repeat.
An article I read recently said that overclocking will become increasingly non-viable as process nodes shrink. It seems we're seeing that already. The article says an Intel executive said Intel is taking overclocking seriously but the company may not have much choice.
Intel should have included hardware devoted to h.265 encoding for Skylake at least. Maybe it did, but it's not like I can tell by the charts provided. What is the point of putting in that h.265 encoding chart and not including the fastest non-E Haswell (4790K) and a Haswell-E (5820K)? It makes it look like your site is trying to hype Skylake. Don't you think people who are doing a lot of tasks like that which require serious performance (like the "slowest" setting in Handbrake) are going to need to see a comparison with the best available options?