From a i5 2500k to a i7 6700k: my impressions

[~>Dg<~]

go play bf4 on a 2500k then go play on a modern 6700k or x99 cpu. tell me there is no difference. if people tell you there isnt they either blind or stupid.

 

[Superlevure]

go play bf4 on a 2500k then go play on a modern 6700k or x99 cpu. tell me there is no difference. if people tell you there isnt they either blind or stupid.

But what about the overclocking? Are we talking about an OC 2500k?

Clearly, if we compare two stock CPUs, my old i5 is completely buried by my i7 6700k.

 

[dakaiez]

Yeah for streaming an i7 is going to help massively.

Yeah exactly, the 2500k still had life in it, but depending what you do on a daily/regular basis something like a Skylake/x99 may work quite a bit better.

If i just gamed with friends i wouldn't have bothered, would have just got the 980ti and carried on. Now i record gameplay, stream and so forth and the difference from just the CPU alone was a massive upgrade and the gpu was the cherry on top. Now can max out most games and stream with barely any hits to the FPS at all and no slowdowns.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

go play bf4 on a 2500k then go play on a modern 6700k or x99 cpu. tell me there is no difference. if people tell you there isnt they either blind or stupid.

BF4 scales well with threads and people running the game in Mantle get even decent framerates in the game with older CPUs. So a lot of the AMD card owners owning their most popular enthusiast cards like the R9 290 and 390 series are going to be far less CPU limited.

So comparing an 8 thread or 12 thread CPU is kind of daft,since the Core i5 2500K is a 4 thread CPU.

The same engine is used on Battlefront which seems to be scale well to all sorts of hardware.

But like with PS2 which is another CPU limited game,the best players don''t generally always have the best hardware and moreover many of the competitive lot drop down all the details to minimum anyway since it helps in many games as a technical cheat.

For example when running PS2,mates with Haswell chips are having the same dips as I have in the game with an older IB based chip. That is a far more CPU limited game than BF4 would ever hope to be. Yet you got people laughing in comms that even their overclocked IB and Haswell chips can suffer in the game. Pfft.

A lot of the time hardware enthusiasts are running FPS counters in the corner measurebating about how many FPS they are getting and unlike competitive players tend to like to whack the settings up.

That's why if you look at some of the SC2 tournaments I was surprised to see people running them on laptops and not even the chunky desktop replacement type.

Then add the fact that most people are probably not running anything higher than a GTX970/R9 390,and that is coming from the enthusiast orientated Steam Survey,plenty of people are more likely to be GPU limited.

All the tests hardware enthusiasts like to cherry pick are running overclocked GTX980TI or Titan X cards,which are 50% faster than say a GTX970:

https://tpucdn.com/reviews/ASUS/GTX_980_Ti_STRIX_Gaming/images/perfrel_1920.gif

Even if you added 30% from going from a Core i5 2500K to a Core i5 6600K,unless you are going to run a top end card,which most people are not then an older CPU is still perfectly fine.

PS:

The people who say otherwise are blind or stupid.

 

[~>Dg<~]

no one said the i5 older gens are bad.

just saying if you cant notice the difference you are blind.

i get 30/40 percent better performance in bf4 than my old i3570k in 64 mp games.

now the balls are being switched with gpus and such but im on about just cpu difference. its massive.

shangai on my settings on old cpu my fps would be around 140 ish.64mp conquest.now with 5820k doesnt move from 200.every map bang 200.

so the performance is perfectly fine on older i5s i have the older i5 in another pc at side of me but its just no close to newer performance in some games.

so yes in some games it can be close or you do get exceptable performance but when you can enjoy games so much better then yes its worth upgrading. if you happy with your performance . fine.

 

[C64]

There's barely a difference between a 6700k and even an old lynfield clock for clock in games nevermind 2500k, it's when you want top end gpus that newer cpus make a bigger difference.

It was a schoolboy error on your part and you should have simply overlcoked the 2500k.

Still it's nice to have native 6gb/s sata and lower electric bills.

I am still i5 750 @4.1 ghz and it's fine.

All these graphs people throw out are useless look at some real benches on youtube comparing games on latest drivers etc between cpus.

Be lucky to see a 10 fps gap.

 

[Ayahuasca]

It depends a lot on your resolution and the games you play.

Those at 1080p (and god forbid any lower) will benefit a lot from a newer CPU. Those at 1440p and higher will benefit more from a new high end GPU.

i5 750 may well be fine but if you actually compared framerate and frametimes in any game that makes good use of your CPU it will be obliterated by any modern CPU, especially a 6700k or 5820k.

 

[C64]

It depends a lot on your resolution and the games you play.

Those at 1080p (and god forbid any lower) will benefit a lot from a newer CPU. Those at 1440p and higher will benefit more from a new high end GPU.

i5 750 may well be fine but if you actually compared framerate and frametimes in any game that makes good use of your CPU it will be obliterated by any modern CPU, especially a 6700k or 5820k.

not clock for clock it wont be lucky if it's +10 fps

How do I know ? because I have an 1150 board sat here gigabyte z97p-d3 and have had a haswell g3258 and 4770k in it clocked to 4.5ghz and I barely gained anything.

So much so I sold the haswells on and kept the cheap board until 4790k's are way cheaper second hand.

But again like you said it can really depend what you're playing and at which resolution as well, obviously very cpu hungry games will benefit more.

Also a lot of online games fps can be server side dependent.

 

[Ayahuasca]

Yes it will, there's plenty of professional and user benchmarks out there that show a big difference between pre 2500k CPU's and modern ones.

What games did you do your testing on?

 

[C64]

arma III
BF4
left4dead
coh 1

 

[Ayahuasca]

AIII - multiplayer is indeed server side dependent on framerate

BF4 - I'd be very surprised with this one if you barely gained anything, reviews show a huge increase from 2500k to 6700k never mind an older i5.

left4dead and coh 1, yeah you aren't going to gain much out of those.

In your case it likely wasn't worth it considering only 1 of those will show a noticeable gain and even then BF4 runs at a high enough framerate where an extra 20fps might not be noticeable.

 

[realscot]

Surely it's easy enough to figure out which part of your pc is the bottleneck? Simply monitor your cpu and gpu usage while gaming, which ever one is topping out first is surely the bottleneck? If you are getting good FPS, ignore and put your wallet away. Personally for me, the CPU has never became a bottleneck in the past until I started running multi gpu's, then very quickly you could see an older CPU struggle, and the GPU's weren't using all their potential. I'm a big fan of buying yesterdays best tech, you can't beat the value/performance ratio. Often the best thing about buying previous generations especially with GPU's is you can have 2 (or more!) gpu's for less than the price of the current new top end and also be faster than it.

 

[Superlevure]

Surely it's easy enough to figure out which part of your pc is the bottleneck? Simply monitor your cpu and gpu usage while gaming, which ever one is topping out first is surely the bottleneck? If you are getting good FPS, ignore and put your wallet away. Personally for me, the CPU has never became a bottleneck in the past until I started running multi gpu's, then very quickly you could see an older CPU struggle, and the GPU's weren't using all their potential. I'm a big fan of buying yesterdays best tech, you can't beat the value/performance ratio. Often the best thing about buying previous generations especially with GPU's is you can have 2 (or more!) gpu's for less than the price of the current new top end and also be faster than it.

Is it that simple? I'm pretty sure my i5 was never pushed to 100%. More like 40%. Isn't there a question of architecture?

 

[Franksie]

simpler decision for me - my Q6600/P5N-D combo needs upgrading. My main problem is what to upgrade it with

 

[DragonQ]

simpler decision for me - my Q6600/P5N-D combo needs upgrading. My main problem is what to upgrade it with

Depends on your usage patterns and whether you plan on keeping the system for as long as your previous one. For longevity and multi-threaded performance, X99 is usually a better bet. For shorter-term, single-threaded power for gaming, an i5-6600K is probably best.

 

[RichardH754]

I'm still waiting, I need to see how much faster a 6700k is against my old I7 970 @ 4.5, the min frame rate must be faster on the new 6700k?

 

[Franksie]

Depends on your usage patterns and whether you plan on keeping the system for as long as your previous one. For longevity and multi-threaded performance, X99 is usually a better bet. For shorter-term, single-threaded power for gaming, an i5-6600K is probably best.

I think I'm going hold out for onboard graphics on the Broadwell-E as I'll probably keep it a long time again

 

[sebna]

I am planning to upgrade to 1080 or 1070 GTX (from 570GTX) and I am wondering about going [email protected] on air depending what chip I would get from my current [email protected] ghz... I game on 1440p@144hz capable screen with gsync.

Should I go 6700k or not bother? Desktop performance of q9550 is fantastic but wonder about gaming with 1070-1080 at 1440p with high HZ.

Thanks lads

 

[AllBodies]

I am planning to upgrade to 1080 or 1070 GTX (from 570GTX) and I am wondering about going [email protected] on air depending what chip I would get from my current [email protected] ghz... I game on 1440p@144hz capable screen with gsync.

Should I go 6700k or not bother? Desktop performance of q9550 is fantastic but wonder about gaming with 1070-1080 at 1440p with high HZ.

Thanks lads

The 6700k is a MASSIVE upgrade from a q9550, and will likely be necessary even with a GTX1070 due to CPU bottleneck. You won't be able to drive 144Hz easily without ample CPU power.

 

[kylew_is_back]

I'm still waiting, I need to see how much faster a 6700k is against my old I7 970 @ 4.5, the min frame rate must be faster on the new 6700k?

around 60%