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

Binned chips are bought in from certain tested batches, (hence the term binned referring to speed binned). The oem chips arent returns and as far as overclocking potential, you have the same chance in the silicon lottery as buying a retail boxed chip. It has been stated on here before by ocuk employees, binned chips are purchased by a separate person to those chips that go on sale as standard oem or retail.
 
I have a question that has been on my mind for a long time. Do I upgrade to 16gb of ram on my 2500k @ 4.2ghz or do I save that £50 and put it into a new cpu on the next release? I'm finding that my PC keeps eating up all 8gb and it could do with more.

I have a 1080 strix coming some time this year, so I anticipate the CPU is going to be a bottle neck in some games.

The other question on my mind is how expensive the CPUs will be when they release. If our economy is going up and down like a yoyo, we may see ridiculous price hikes with a low pound. Buying ram now may at least help tie me over.
 
OK, I have an overclocked 1080 so in terms of GPUs I can't really get much faster at the moment.

Should I upgrade my overclocked 2500k at 4.5GHz to something like a 6700k?

My score in Firestrike probably says yes. My graphics score has exceeded 24000k on some runs but the physics score is hovering around the 8k mark. Other rigs with a similar card but more modern CPU get much better scores.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9172520

My fps in games haven't massively increased either so subjectively, I feel that the trusty ole sandybridge has come to the end of its life.

Would you upgrade to a 6700k or similar in my position? Would it be worth the expense of a new mobo, DDR4 ram as well as the CPU?
 
Doppleganger said:
OK, I have an overclocked 1080 so in terms of GPUs I can't really get much faster at the moment.

Should I upgrade my overclocked 2500k at 4.5GHz to something like a 6700k?

My score in Firestrike probably says yes. My graphics score has exceeded 24000k on some runs but the physics score is hovering around the 8k mark. Other rigs with a similar card but more modern CPU get much better scores.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9172520

My fps in games haven't massively increased either so subjectively, I feel that the trusty ole sandybridge has come to the end of its life.

Would you upgrade to a 6700k or similar in my position? Would it be worth the expense of a new mobo, DDR4 ram as well as the CPU?
Click to expand...

Definitely need a CPU upgrade with a GPU like that. I can see my 2500k @ 4.4 bottlenecking my 980 @1500 in some modern games, Battlefield 4, Total war warhammer and Witcher 3 (only in novigrad though) its noticeable. 100% cpu usage and 70-99% gpu usage.

Check your gpu usage in modern games, I bet its like 50-60% while your cpu is at 100% usage.
 
Doppleganger said:
OK, I have an overclocked 1080 so in terms of GPUs I can't really get much faster at the moment.

Should I upgrade my overclocked 2500k at 4.5GHz to something like a 6700k?

My score in Firestrike probably says yes. My graphics score has exceeded 24000k on some runs but the physics score is hovering around the 8k mark. Other rigs with a similar card but more modern CPU get much better scores.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/9172520

My fps in games haven't massively increased either so subjectively, I feel that the trusty ole sandybridge has come to the end of its life.

Would you upgrade to a 6700k or similar in my position? Would it be worth the expense of a new mobo, DDR4 ram as well as the CPU?
Click to expand...

Here you go, a good comparison with the exception of 2133Mhz vs 3200Mhz RAM, same system with upgraded CPU,Mobo and RAM..

2700K @ 4.5Ghz

SCORE
8 299 with AMD Radeon HD 7950(1x) and Intel Core i7-2700K
Graphics Score 9 418
Physics Score 11 373
Combined Score 3 614

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9710912?

6700K @ 4.5Ghz

9 358 with AMD Radeon HD 7950(1x) and Intel Core i7-6700K
Graphics Score 10 622
Physics Score 14 342
Combined Score 3 877

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/12973367?

Games feel so much smoother now, even with the same old AMD 7950 in there.. 6700K is just a beast compared to Sandy.

Lucky i got mine from OcUK for £296 before it went up to the £330 its at now.

Well pleased with the perf though, and seen as low as 18c idle temps :p

Note: I guess the later Crimson GPU driver bumped up the GPU score a bit along with the 6700K helping it out too.
 
greatash said:
Definitely need a CPU upgrade with a GPU like that. I can see my 2500k @ 4.4 bottlenecking my 980 @1500 in some modern games, Battlefield 4, Total war warhammer and Witcher 3 (only in novigrad though) its noticeable. 100% cpu usage and 70-99% gpu usage.

Check your gpu usage in modern games, I bet its like 50-60% while your cpu is at 100% usage.
Click to expand...

Interesting. When I'm in Novigrad on Witcher 3 my CPU (8320) is at around 50-70% usage and the 1080 at 99-100%.
 
The combined score shows a 7-8% improvement over the 2700k.

I can only guess that the minimums make it seem so much smoother, as sandy would still seem to be in the ballpark from the raw figures.
 
Joe Nose said:
The combined score shows a 7-8% improvement over the 2700k.

I can only guess that the minimums make it seem so much smoother, as sandy would still seem to be in the ballpark from the raw figures.
Click to expand...

I guess the 3DMark score doesnt do it justice in improvement.. but in Second Life (which is OpenGL if that matters) the difference is massive, i see 100+ fps over the Sandybridge.. Arma 3 Battle Royale is a lot smoother.. DayZ SA much better too. I also noticed BF4 feeling much smoother with higher fps aswell.

Overall the improvement is pretty big over my 2700K with the same clock speeds.

I just need to upgrade that 7950 now to something that compliments the Skylake chip :)
 
For anyone that's interested, I recently upgraded my 2500k with 8gb to a 2600k with 16gb. I've only got a 780 GTX.

Wow, everything is smoother when gaming, I don't have direct comparisons but the whole experience is better. Its even allowed me to select Ultra in Forza beta which was previously locked.

Tomb Raider was night and day different, meaning actually playable at 1440p instead of having to drop to 1080.

So instead of a massive upgrade you could spend <<£200 and get quite a bit of a jump if you buy smart.
 
Thanks for the input guys. Think you've confirmed what I'm suspecting, that it's time to upgrade.

The only question now is what to upgrade to.I'm tempted to just go in at the deep end and get a 6700k, which should tied me over for the next 2-3 years I'm thinking. Is there much chance of hex and octo cores taking over in the next few years you think?
 
I've experienced the same effect from a CPU upgrade regarding massively improved framerates in most games although, admittedly, my CPU upgrade was from a Q9550 @3.6GHz to an i5 6600K @4.5GHz, so I was expecting to see some difference.

The difference was much larger than expected though with minimum framerates using the same AMD 7950 graphics card almost doubling across the board. The old Q9550 that some still regard as a fairly capable gaming CPU seemingly isn't by comparison.

I'm guessing this is down to a combination of IPC and IOPS improvements along with greatly increased memory bandwidth, but I never expected it to be so huge when the common mantra seems to be that your graphics card will nearly always be the bottleneck.

There's an interesting review on the PC Labs Polish website of a wide range of modern CPUs running a wide selection of recent games showing large variations in framerates when using the same GTX980 Strix in all tests. They're broadly similar to what I've observed with my 7950 in terms of scaling vs architecture/clock speed.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&tl=en&u=http://pclab.pl/art66945.html

It's worth noting that their overclocked vs stock-clocked results are also scaling nicely in most cases.

The mystery to me is why some people are genuinely seeing these large benefits while it seems as though others aren't.
 
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I recently upgraded from a 4670k to a 6700k as my 4670k died (first time a CPU has ever died on me!). I'm seeing desktop and gaming benefits, I'm pleased with it.

For reference, mine is running at 4.7Ghz at 1.32v bios (1.312 idle and 1.344 full load in the real world). It hits 72c when stress testing on air. I could push it further, but core 3 runs 10c hotter than the others, I've replaced the TIM and reseated my CPU cooler 3 times and I'm not willing to delid, so I'll just stick with what I've got.
 
Guys would going from a 2500k @ 4.6ghz to buying a used 3770k be any good fps wise? Will be playing BF1 etc when it's released, I've been looking for FPS benchmarks but I can't find anything.
 
glad to see you're noticing the difference! those sandy bridge cpus were kick *** back in the day!! I only got rid of my lynfield i5-750 a few years ago that was at 4.2ghz and was a little beast :p
 
Running my 2500k @ 4.5ghz and it'll run anything I've thrown at it so far. Absolutley no desire to upgrade it yet, especially with dx12 inc, but as the op did PC, I can understand the difference he sees. My main question is, why wouldn't you overclock a 2500k when it's so easy to get good gains?
 
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