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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ES_Revenge - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
Umm what the heck happened to the power consumption? In particular the i7/6700K. It's not really shown thoroughly in this review but the Broadwell CPUs are more power-efficient it seems. While the 6700K has a half GHz faster clock speed, it also has a much lesser GPU. To begin with, both the i5 and i7 Skylake parts have higher TDPs than the Broadwell desktop parts, and then the 6700K can actually draw over 100W when loaded. This is above its TDP and also significantly more than its 6600K counterpart which runs only a few hundred MHz slower. Odd.I mean I think we were all waiting for a desktop CPU that didn't have the power constraints as the Broadwell CPUs did but I don't think this is exactly what anyone was expecting. It's like these Skylake CPUs don't just take more power but they do so...for no reason at all. Sure they're faster but not hugely so; and, again, their iGPUs are significantly slower than Broadwell's. So their slight speed advantage came at the price of markedly increased power consumption over the previous gen.
That only leads me to the question--WTF? lol What happened here with the power consumption? And losing that IVR didn't seem to help anything, eh? Skylake is fast and all but TBH I was more impressed *overall* with Broadwell (and those CPUs you can't even find for sale anywhere, the last time I checked--a few weeks ago). Granted as we've seen in 2nd part of the Broadwell review it's not a stellar OCer but still, overall it seems better to me than Skylake.
It's kind of funny because when Broadwell DT launched I was thinking of how "Intel is mainly focusing on power consumption these days", meaning I thought they weren't focused enough on performance of DT CPUs. But it seems they've just thrown that out the window but the performance isn't anything *spectacular* from these CPUs, so it just seems like a step backwards. It's like with Broadwell they were showing just how much performance they could do with both CPU and iGPU with a minimum of power consumption--and the result was impressive. Here it's like they just forgot about that and said "It's Skylake...it's new and better! Everyone buy it!" Not really that impressive.
janolsen - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
Stupid question:Can Skylake IGP easily play back 4K video. Thinking of a person just using a 4K screen for Youtube stuff, not gaming...
ES_Revenge - Saturday, August 15, 2015 - link
Yeah it can. This one of the very few improvements over Broadwell/previous HD Graphics implementations. It has a "full" HEVC decode solution built in, unlike the "hybrid" solutions they had previously. If you look on the 4th page of the review it actually goes pretty in-depth about this (not sure how you missed that?).alacard - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
It's clear you put a ton of work into this Ian, many thanks.Flash13 - Monday, August 17, 2015 - link
So, far Intel Core i7-6700K 8M Skylake Quad-Core 4.0GHz is just vapor to the public.somatzu - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
"So where'd you get your degree?""Anandtech comments section."
superjim - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
I'm still not convinced this is a worthwhile upgrade from Sandy Bridge. If I can get 4.8 from a 2700K and maybe 4.6 from a 6700k, factor in cost difference, is it really worth it? At the end of the day, cpu/mobo/ram would be near $700 for maybe a 15% speed bump overall.watzupken - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
From a desktop standpoint, there is very little incentive for one to upgrade. The new gen mainly targets power savings, so likely to benefit mobile users, i.e. Ultra Books and tablets.As far as Intel is trying to target those people still on Sandy and Ivy Bridge to upgrade, they fail to account for the cost of upgrade for a paltry improvement in performance. To upgrade from SB, one has to upgrade the ram, motherboard and CPU, and on top of that, need to separately purchase a heatsink since they want to cut cost.
CynicalCyanide - Saturday, August 22, 2015 - link
Question to the Authors: You've noted two DDR4 equipped mobos in the "Test Setup" section, but you've also tested DDR3 equipped Skylake. Which motherboard did you use for that?Furthermore, in a previous article it was mentioned that Z170 wouldn't be able to handle 'regular' 1.5V DDR3, but here apparently it wasn't an issue reusing old 1.5V RAM after a voltage adjustment. Was there any special method required aside from booting as per normal into the BIOS and adjusting the voltage?
TiberiuC - Saturday, August 22, 2015 - link
Everything comes down eventualy to "Intel vs AMD". What Intel did with Core2Duo was the right path to go, what AMD did was so wrong and that sometimes happen when you inovate. AMD stopped with the last FX series and went back to the drawing board and that is a wise decision. What will ZEN do? i am expecting Ivi Bridge performance maybe touching haswell here and there. If this wont happen, it is bad for them and very bad for us. Intel is starting to milk the customers acting like there is a monopoly. I did buy my 2600k for 300$ (after rebates), i have to say that the price of the 6700k is well, meh...