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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xxxGODxxx - Saturday, October 31, 2015 - link
Hi guys I would like to know whether I should buy the 6600k with a z170 mobo at $417 or should I buy a 3930k with a x79 mobo at $330? I'm not too sure if the extra IPC of the 6600k is enough to warrant the extra $87 over the 3930k especially since I will be overclocking the cpu and I will be gaming on a r9 390 (maybe I will add one more 390 in the future) at 1440p.Toyevo - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link
Even now I hesitate at updating a Phenom II X4 945. The Samsung 950 Pro pushed me over the line, and with it the need for PCIe M.2 only available in recent generations. There's no holy grail in CPUs, only what's relevant for each individual today. Of several other systems I have, none demand any change yet. On the Intel side my 2500K (and up) I wouldn't bother with even Skylake. With AMD my FX6300 (and up) are more power hungry but entirely adequate. And our E5-2xxx servers sit on Ivy Bridge until early 2017.What does all this mean? Not a lot.. In the same way many of you see Skylake as a non event, I equally saw Broadwell and Haswell as non events. 20 years ago the jumps were staggering, overclocking wasn't nearly as trendy, nor as straight forward, but entirely necessary, the cost of new hardware prohibitively expensive. The generations were so definitive and fast back then.
i_will_eat_you - Saturday, December 12, 2015 - link
This is a good review, especially the look at memory latency. The 4690K is left out however from a lot of benchmarks. If you include that then I don't see much of an attraction to skylake. There is also the concern about the new rootkit support skylake introduces with protected code execution. This is not something I see being used for the good of the consumer.My one gripe is the lack of benchmarks for intense game engines (simulations, etc). Total war is there which is a step forward but I'm not sure if that benchmark really measures simulation engine performance.
If you take games such as Sins of a Solar Empire or Supreme Commander then they have a separate thread for graphics so tend to maintain a decent frame rate even when the game engine runs at a crawl. The more units you add to the map and the more that is going on the slower it goes. But this is not in FPS. It means that ordering a ship across the solar system might take 10 s when there are 1000 units in the game but 5 minutes when there are 100000 units in the game. I would love to see some benchmarks measuring engine performance of games such as this with the unit limits greatly increased. It is a bit of a niche but many sim games (RTS, etc) scale naturally which means you can increase the unit limit, map size, AI difficulty, number of AIs, etc as your hardware becomes more powerful.
This is especially relevant with CPUs such as the broadwell which might gain a big advantage each game loop processing the very large simulation engine dataset.
systemBuilder - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link
Wow your review really sucked. Where are the benchmarks for the i5-6600k? Did you forget?POPCORNS - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
To me, It doesn't matter if there's no IPC improvement over Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge or Haswell,Because I've upgraded from a Wolfdale Celeron (E3300) to a Skylake (6700K), lol.
oranos - Thursday, December 29, 2016 - link
This article seems to be confused. DDR4 brings more sustained framerates for higher resolutions (especially 4k). Really a waste of time doing a 1080p comparison.oranos - Thursday, December 29, 2016 - link
if you wanted to do a proper test for DDR4 gaming performance you should run a 6700K and GTX 1080 minimum and run multiple games in 4K for testing.