The Intel 6th Gen Skylake Review: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTWhat You Can Buy: Office and Web Benchmarks
For the last segment of graphs, we have the same data as the previous few generational pages but we have also included other processors from our database for non-standard comparisons.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Office Performance
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 totaling 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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experttech - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
I have a Sandy Bridge 2600K running on a Asus H67 EVO motherboard, so not overclocked. My motherboard is slowly dying. First the obboard sound died, then the reset is now working. Now I am wondering whether to upgrade the motherboard to an overclockable Sandy Bridge motherboard or jump the wagon to 6700K. I mostly do Video Editing and Encoding, no gaming. or wait till the motherboard dies completely and hope SkyLake E or Kaby Lake is out by that time. Any suggestions?sonny73n - Wednesday, August 12, 2015 - link
2600K is an excellent chip. I'd rather have the i7-2600K than the new i5-6600K. You should get a new MB Z77 but there's not many still available now. I only saw 1 Z77 on Newegg, it's the Asrock and I think it costs around $160. You can also find used Z68 and Z77 MBs on Amazon or eBay but I wouldn't recommend it. Video editing with the 2600K is a piece of cake and x264 encoding is not bad either. Keep the chip and spend your money on a good video card and a nice 4K ips monitor.experttech - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Thanks for your reply. I too realized the same, I did notice the only Z77 Asrock motherboard (which is an excellent motherboard by the way) but for the price, I can't justify buying it especially since so many options are available in the new platform. One interesting thing I noticed is that with the newer instruction sets, my laptop with i5 5200U actually renders some frames very fast but overall, my i7 2600K renders the finished movie quicker. So though there are IPC improvements in the newer chips, the basic features (performance, mutithreading etc) haven't changed night and day. Of course I am comparing a Sandy bridge i7 to a lower clocked Broadwell i5 but I am not sure if there will be a tangible difference upgrading to SkyLake as of now. So you are right my friend and thanks for the advice!I do have a 1440p monitor and its amazing how much real estate you get going from 1080p. Definitely one of the best upgrades I made. I will look into a 4K monitor as they have come down quite a bit in price.
phillipstuerzl - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
Hi,On your 5th page, under Test Setup, you list the i5 6600K as being 4C/8T. This is incorrect. It is not hyperthreaded, and only 4C/4T.
Great article!
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
Thanks!DannyDan - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
So do we expect the 1151 socket to have a few good upgraded processors down the road? It really sucked getting a socket 1156 CPU.mdw9604 - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
Moore's law is a crock of $%!24. 7 years later and Intel still hasn't doubled the performance the i7 870. Core for Core.The may be able to cram more transistors into a smaller space, but doesn't mean better performance.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
It's funny how every time it fails people say it is being "adjusted", "extended", "massaged", "modified", or something like that. Either it works or it doesn't. It should be called Moore's Heuristic = "process density increases over time" (duh).ES_Revenge - Saturday, August 15, 2015 - link
You misunderstand Moore's Law. Moore's law has nothing [necessarily] to do with performance. Moore's law only states that the number of transistors possible in a given space will double every two years. It also doesn't just apply to Intel and mainstream CPUs, it applies to *all* integrated circuits. Everything from CPUs to EEPROMS, to SOCs, to microcontrollers, to image sensors...etc. these things are all included as they're all ICs. So, on average, it still holds AFAIK.Whether or not a 14nm chip outperforms, or how much it outperforms, a 28nm one (there wasn't one for Intel, but Sandy was 32nm) is NOT what Moore's Law predicts. Other people have construed this "Law" to mean things about performance (including some guy at Intel that once said performance would double every xx months--totally wrong and not what Moore's Law states anyway), but it's not about performance and certainly not just about desktop CPUs.
You can't say something is a "crock of $%!24" if you don't know what it's about to begin with.
Kutark - Thursday, August 20, 2015 - link
Unfortunately, whether or not someone understands something has never stopped someone from speaking their mind on it. Hell, look at pretty much every election under the sun. The vast majority of people who vote in them couldn't even give you a basic rundown of the issues at hand, yet they sure do have an opinion on it...