Soldato
- Joined
- 12 May 2011
- Posts
- 6,274
- Location
- Southampton
Here's the sequel no one asked for: Two and a half years ago I wrote a post about my 2009 i7-860 and considered whether it still held up for gaming. The answer was yes - it could give playable framerates, sometimes in excess of 60fps, in modern games. A few years have passed and a new console generation has launched and seems to be gaining steam so I revisited this PC to see if this 13 year old platform could still game on newer titles that have since launched.
This actually came about because I pulled out my main PC from under my desk and noticed it was horrendously dusty...
...but I can't quite be bothered to open it all up and take it apart to clean it out. So I threw the i7 board/ram combo that was already set up into my otherwise already set up Project PC case and put my main PC out of sight out of mind waiting to be cleaned. This inadvertently set the 'challenge' of me having to actually use this i7-860 as my main PC for a week or however long it takes me to get my arse into gear. If it's pretty bad going it might actually encourage me to sort out my proper PC.
I've come across a few more parts in my Project PC Parts Stash over the last couple of years so this PC has a couple of upgrades over the previous iteration, and now sports:
What's it like to use day to day in 2022?
I put a fresh Windows 10 install on the drive and it's still completely fine to use day to day. Windows, MS Edge, Spotify, Youtube, Steam and Epic and Xbox and Ubi Connect all running and downloading at the same time. Nothing waits or hangs.
There is fan noise when the CPU is working, which is all the time, and it is definitely audible. It's louder than my main PC but that has a £100 360mm AIO thing. When I am just doing youtube it is just as quiet as my main PC, because the overclock still has speedstep (I think its called) enabled that allows the CPU to downclock and downvolt when it's not doing much.
Boot up is surprisingly quick considering it's a SATA II interface - not as quick as my NVME but still completely usable.
Drivers all installed fine through Windows Update and all the features like integrated audio play nicely with Windows 10. I'm happily switching between its optical output, Quest 2, Wireless Headphones and my TV as sound outputs. It doesn't have any problems switching video between my TV and my monitor.
The overclock is completely stable and I haven't touched it for a couple of months, with the system being disassembled and reassembled a couple of times this year as I mess with various project PCs.
Just how slow is it in theory?
To demonstrate how far behind it is compared to modern CPUs I ran the new Cinebench R23 benchmark which was not out in 2019 when I did the last tests.
So yeah. That's a multithreaded score of 2941, or about 800 behind a 15 watt i7-1165G7 and 5,948 behind a now-quite-old Ryzen 1700X. Ouch.
Likewise, single core is several times worse than significantly slower clocked CPUs.
But how does it game?
The 2019 post I made shows that the i7 can play 2015 to 2019 games pretty well, including RDR2, Destiny 2, GTA V etc. With new releases coming out since can it still keep up with these games?
All games run at 1440p with no scaling unless specified. I updated the 2070 super to the latest Nvidia drivers rather than what windows provided.
Far Cry 6
Requirements for 1080p High 60FPS: 3600X or i7-7700K
It's a free weekend for this so I thought I'd try it out as a fairly new game. This ran "fine" on high settings with the benchmark with an average FPS of 58. As you would hope in 2022 it is a very multithreaded game and all cores and threads were in use, but not running at 100%. The GPU was also not running at 100%.
Microstuttering was not noticeable but there were several one-off larger framedrops were as you can see by the graph and minimum frame rate; the graph looks pretty scary but that main area of saw-tooth is over about 7fps once you look at the scale.
If I had any interest in the game whatsoever I would have been quite happy playing like this.
Anno 1800
Requirements for 1080p High 60fps: i5 4960K or Ryzen 1500X
This is probably tied as my second favourite peaceful strategy game, alongside Transport Fever 2 (my favourite is Cities Skylines). It also has an entirely wonderful soundtrack.
This benchmark ran fine with an average framerate of 82fps, 60fps and 48fps across the three runs of progressively busier cities. This was on ultra settings with 8x Antialiasing and no FX framescaling shenanigans.
In game my medium sized city saw a consistent but low framerate (in the region of 30fps). I lowered the camera to its cinematic angle and got 80fps when just looking at the ocean; over the city it was about 25! This was despite GPU and CPU usage being low over the city.
At this point I began to suspect the PCI-E 2.0 slot and it's 8GB/s bandwidth was starving the card. I enabled the GPU BUS setting to monitor but this showed up as 6% which seems erroneously low. Hmmm.
Snow Runner
Requirements: i3-4130 (i7-8700 recommended)
This is a game I'm actually into a the moment and I put a few hours into it this week. It again runs fine on max settings, between 50 and 60 (frame limiter). It doesn't have a built in benchmark so I did an MSI afterburner benchmark of a couple of minutes of driving around mud and whatnot and got:
Maximum: 62fps
Average: 57fps
Minimum: 50fps
This time I turned on Framebuffer and Bus overlays but this is still very low with 15% of FB in use and still 6% of PCI bandwidth in use.
I'm quite happy playing this at these frame rates.
GTA San Andreas Definitive Edition
Requirements: i5-6600K (i7-2700K recommended[?])
Whilst this is known to be a crap stuttery remaster, I've tried it on an i5 3570 with the exact same RAM sticks and GPU and it had poor performance so I was interested to try it on this CPU. I ran this on max settings but without TAA and without any DLSS going on. Here is the MSI afterburner results after 3 minutes of driving around San Fierro:
Maximum: 90fps
Average: 64fps
Minimum: 46fps
It doesn't feel very smooth but I am not convinced this is the CPUs fault as it's pretty stuttery on most systems. When I locked it to 60fps it felt much better, and I re ran the benchmark with a few settings turned down and with DLSS on Quality.
Maximum: 61fps
Average: 60fps
Minimum: 54fps
AC Valhalla
Requirements 1080p High 60fps: Ryzen 7 1700 or i7-6700
This is the current Assassins Creed Open-world-'em-up from Ubisoft and represents a visual step up from Origins that I tested in 2019. I stuck this onto the high present with 100% scaling (no game I don't want you to default to 70% scaling thanks)
Wow OK, that's some microstutter right there! It felt fine in gameplay but I thought I'd try a workaround:
I lock the framerate to 37fps (i.e. 1/4 of 144hz or half my 75hz other screen I have) and with this new-found GPU headroom, I put it up to ultra settings. (requirements for this is 3600X or i7-7700K)
So here we have a "quality" mode like the consoles have but with seven (23%) extra fps. It's basically chopping off the top 2/3 of the uncapped mode graph. I could probably go a few fps higher and try to find a balance of dips and overall framerate. The one big dip in the 37fps limited graph was me taking a screenshot.
Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy
Recommended Requirements Ryzen 5 1600 or i7-4790
This is a 2021 title on Gamepass that I have never played, but it is a new game with DLSS and Raytracing so I thought it'd see how it ran, even if it is the opposite of "my kind of thing". I whacked it on the high preset settings without DLSS or Raytracing and got:
Max: 80fps
Ave: 66fps
Min: 5fps
Yikes - it seems my CPU had a little nap at some point and had a response/frame time of 650 miliseconds!
I then tried it with a High preset but with High Level of Detail, RT on high and DLSS on balanced. This run didn't have the one-off CPU spike and had an average of 57fps and minimum of 27.
Finally I then tried capping the framerate at 37fps in Afterburner with running the benchmark again at "high+" settings. This performed much smoother:
Maximum: 38fps
Average: 37fps
Minimum: 31fps
Three frame drops to see, one of which was me taking a in-game screenshot above. I would probably play the game like this if I wanted to play it, as a console-like quality mode but with the slightly increased framerate. I could probably increase the limiter to 45fps and set my monitor to 90Hz or just enable half-rate vsync or whatever.
Cyberpunk 2077
Requirements 1080p High 60: i7-4790 or AMD 3200G
This is a pretty hard to run game graphically and on the CPU and I think I'll be settling on some kind of 37fps mode again here.
I ran the benchmark on the high preset without DLSS or RT.
In the bar saw in the region of 60fps whilst out on the street was CPU limited at around 40fps. I turned on DLSS and gave it another go:
The bar scene shot up to the 90s whilst the street scene was still around the 40s.
I spent a bit of time played around a bit out on the street and it hovered in the 40s and 50s. I locked it to 37fps and it was stable with consistent 27ms frame times.
What About VR?
I play Steam and Oculus VR games on my main PC so I set it up with this i7 PC to see how it fared. I am immediately greeted by a window on the Oculus application telling me that my PC doesn't meet the requirements.
Whilst the motherboard doesn't even have USB 3.0 on it anywhere, the GPU has a USB-C connection which the Quest 2 was happy to use.
First up, beatsabre on Steam - yes this works fine as you might imagine on a game that also works natively on my Quest 2 headset. OK let's cut to the chase and try Half Life Alyx...
I ran an MSI AB benchmark on the desktop window display as well as take screenshots of a FPS counter in game.
The in-game counter through the FPSvr app makes it seem to be running much better than it actually was - I was basically maxing out the CPU and GPU all the time at low settings whenever I glanced down at it.
The benchmark of the mirrored desktop of the game revealed this to be the case. I recorded a couple of minutes of exploring and shooting which returned:
Max 73fps (72fps limit on my Quest 2 on this PC)
Average: 71fps
Minimum 27fps
It was just about playable from a motionsickness point of view with the framerate hovering around 70fps based on the counter on my wrist that I could see in real time as moving around. The CPU usage was flat out high and there was stuttering.
Conclusion
In the context of a CPU that (still) costs £25, it's nuts that it can still be used for gaming 13 years later. No, it's not getting 60fps all that much these days but it is quite happy running new games in excess of 30fps. Using it for day to day browsing and watching it is completely usable and quiet.
However that isn't the full story.
Halo Infinite and Deathloop wouldn't boot and due to a lack of instructions ("New AES Instructions" I think). Perhaps something related to anti-cheat as they're both multiplayer games and new single player games didn't complain about this. Depending on what these instructions do it might be the writing on the wall for this CPU. Well, to go along side all the other writings on the wall, such as...
I'm suspecting that the PCI-e 2.0 8GB/s bandwidth was starving the card, hence getting poor framerates whilst CPU and GPU usage was low.
The CPU might cost £25 but decent boards are getting harder to find and you need a decent board to overclock the CPU (well) and whilst my voltages are pretty low and yellow (not pink or red) in the BIOS, my board's VRMs won't be able to cope forever.
It has USB 2.0 only(!), No NVME, SATA-II only (!!), no UEFI, no TPM for Windows 11...
Should you buy this if you're on a very tight budget?
Balls no it makes a lot more sense to instead buy a cheapo 1155 motherboard (£30) and a 4C/8T Xeon 1230 (£20). Quieter, cooler, PCI-e 3.0 (although not with that specific board), the new instructions, UEFI instead of BIOS... In fact I have that board and a 1240 and considering I am still isolating I might put that into the Project PC case to see how it compares.
This actually came about because I pulled out my main PC from under my desk and noticed it was horrendously dusty...
...but I can't quite be bothered to open it all up and take it apart to clean it out. So I threw the i7 board/ram combo that was already set up into my otherwise already set up Project PC case and put my main PC out of sight out of mind waiting to be cleaned. This inadvertently set the 'challenge' of me having to actually use this i7-860 as my main PC for a week or however long it takes me to get my arse into gear. If it's pretty bad going it might actually encourage me to sort out my proper PC.
I've come across a few more parts in my Project PC Parts Stash over the last couple of years so this PC has a couple of upgrades over the previous iteration, and now sports:
- New Factal Focus G with 2x 120 up front and 1x 120 to the rear.
- ASUS P7P55D-EVO (the old Gigabyte board became unstable and wouldn't boot from any device)
- Ye old i7-860 running at 3.7GHz still
- Silverstone AR01 with two matching Factal 120mm fans (I think from the case originally)
- 2x 8GB of DDR3 2133MHz running at 1680MHz
- Nvidia 2070 Super on a 1440p monitor
- 750GB SSD and 250GB SSD
What's it like to use day to day in 2022?
I put a fresh Windows 10 install on the drive and it's still completely fine to use day to day. Windows, MS Edge, Spotify, Youtube, Steam and Epic and Xbox and Ubi Connect all running and downloading at the same time. Nothing waits or hangs.
There is fan noise when the CPU is working, which is all the time, and it is definitely audible. It's louder than my main PC but that has a £100 360mm AIO thing. When I am just doing youtube it is just as quiet as my main PC, because the overclock still has speedstep (I think its called) enabled that allows the CPU to downclock and downvolt when it's not doing much.
Boot up is surprisingly quick considering it's a SATA II interface - not as quick as my NVME but still completely usable.
Drivers all installed fine through Windows Update and all the features like integrated audio play nicely with Windows 10. I'm happily switching between its optical output, Quest 2, Wireless Headphones and my TV as sound outputs. It doesn't have any problems switching video between my TV and my monitor.
The overclock is completely stable and I haven't touched it for a couple of months, with the system being disassembled and reassembled a couple of times this year as I mess with various project PCs.
Just how slow is it in theory?
To demonstrate how far behind it is compared to modern CPUs I ran the new Cinebench R23 benchmark which was not out in 2019 when I did the last tests.
So yeah. That's a multithreaded score of 2941, or about 800 behind a 15 watt i7-1165G7 and 5,948 behind a now-quite-old Ryzen 1700X. Ouch.
Likewise, single core is several times worse than significantly slower clocked CPUs.
But how does it game?
The 2019 post I made shows that the i7 can play 2015 to 2019 games pretty well, including RDR2, Destiny 2, GTA V etc. With new releases coming out since can it still keep up with these games?
All games run at 1440p with no scaling unless specified. I updated the 2070 super to the latest Nvidia drivers rather than what windows provided.
Far Cry 6
Requirements for 1080p High 60FPS: 3600X or i7-7700K
It's a free weekend for this so I thought I'd try it out as a fairly new game. This ran "fine" on high settings with the benchmark with an average FPS of 58. As you would hope in 2022 it is a very multithreaded game and all cores and threads were in use, but not running at 100%. The GPU was also not running at 100%.
Microstuttering was not noticeable but there were several one-off larger framedrops were as you can see by the graph and minimum frame rate; the graph looks pretty scary but that main area of saw-tooth is over about 7fps once you look at the scale.
If I had any interest in the game whatsoever I would have been quite happy playing like this.
Anno 1800
Requirements for 1080p High 60fps: i5 4960K or Ryzen 1500X
This is probably tied as my second favourite peaceful strategy game, alongside Transport Fever 2 (my favourite is Cities Skylines). It also has an entirely wonderful soundtrack.
This benchmark ran fine with an average framerate of 82fps, 60fps and 48fps across the three runs of progressively busier cities. This was on ultra settings with 8x Antialiasing and no FX framescaling shenanigans.
In game my medium sized city saw a consistent but low framerate (in the region of 30fps). I lowered the camera to its cinematic angle and got 80fps when just looking at the ocean; over the city it was about 25! This was despite GPU and CPU usage being low over the city.
At this point I began to suspect the PCI-E 2.0 slot and it's 8GB/s bandwidth was starving the card. I enabled the GPU BUS setting to monitor but this showed up as 6% which seems erroneously low. Hmmm.
Snow Runner
Requirements: i3-4130 (i7-8700 recommended)
This is a game I'm actually into a the moment and I put a few hours into it this week. It again runs fine on max settings, between 50 and 60 (frame limiter). It doesn't have a built in benchmark so I did an MSI afterburner benchmark of a couple of minutes of driving around mud and whatnot and got:
Maximum: 62fps
Average: 57fps
Minimum: 50fps
This time I turned on Framebuffer and Bus overlays but this is still very low with 15% of FB in use and still 6% of PCI bandwidth in use.
I'm quite happy playing this at these frame rates.
GTA San Andreas Definitive Edition
Requirements: i5-6600K (i7-2700K recommended[?])
Whilst this is known to be a crap stuttery remaster, I've tried it on an i5 3570 with the exact same RAM sticks and GPU and it had poor performance so I was interested to try it on this CPU. I ran this on max settings but without TAA and without any DLSS going on. Here is the MSI afterburner results after 3 minutes of driving around San Fierro:
Maximum: 90fps
Average: 64fps
Minimum: 46fps
It doesn't feel very smooth but I am not convinced this is the CPUs fault as it's pretty stuttery on most systems. When I locked it to 60fps it felt much better, and I re ran the benchmark with a few settings turned down and with DLSS on Quality.
Maximum: 61fps
Average: 60fps
Minimum: 54fps
AC Valhalla
Requirements 1080p High 60fps: Ryzen 7 1700 or i7-6700
This is the current Assassins Creed Open-world-'em-up from Ubisoft and represents a visual step up from Origins that I tested in 2019. I stuck this onto the high present with 100% scaling (no game I don't want you to default to 70% scaling thanks)
Wow OK, that's some microstutter right there! It felt fine in gameplay but I thought I'd try a workaround:
I lock the framerate to 37fps (i.e. 1/4 of 144hz or half my 75hz other screen I have) and with this new-found GPU headroom, I put it up to ultra settings. (requirements for this is 3600X or i7-7700K)
So here we have a "quality" mode like the consoles have but with seven (23%) extra fps. It's basically chopping off the top 2/3 of the uncapped mode graph. I could probably go a few fps higher and try to find a balance of dips and overall framerate. The one big dip in the 37fps limited graph was me taking a screenshot.
Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy
Recommended Requirements Ryzen 5 1600 or i7-4790
This is a 2021 title on Gamepass that I have never played, but it is a new game with DLSS and Raytracing so I thought it'd see how it ran, even if it is the opposite of "my kind of thing". I whacked it on the high preset settings without DLSS or Raytracing and got:
Max: 80fps
Ave: 66fps
Min: 5fps
Yikes - it seems my CPU had a little nap at some point and had a response/frame time of 650 miliseconds!
I then tried it with a High preset but with High Level of Detail, RT on high and DLSS on balanced. This run didn't have the one-off CPU spike and had an average of 57fps and minimum of 27.
Finally I then tried capping the framerate at 37fps in Afterburner with running the benchmark again at "high+" settings. This performed much smoother:
Maximum: 38fps
Average: 37fps
Minimum: 31fps
Three frame drops to see, one of which was me taking a in-game screenshot above. I would probably play the game like this if I wanted to play it, as a console-like quality mode but with the slightly increased framerate. I could probably increase the limiter to 45fps and set my monitor to 90Hz or just enable half-rate vsync or whatever.
Cyberpunk 2077
Requirements 1080p High 60: i7-4790 or AMD 3200G
This is a pretty hard to run game graphically and on the CPU and I think I'll be settling on some kind of 37fps mode again here.
I ran the benchmark on the high preset without DLSS or RT.
In the bar saw in the region of 60fps whilst out on the street was CPU limited at around 40fps. I turned on DLSS and gave it another go:
The bar scene shot up to the 90s whilst the street scene was still around the 40s.
I spent a bit of time played around a bit out on the street and it hovered in the 40s and 50s. I locked it to 37fps and it was stable with consistent 27ms frame times.
What About VR?
I play Steam and Oculus VR games on my main PC so I set it up with this i7 PC to see how it fared. I am immediately greeted by a window on the Oculus application telling me that my PC doesn't meet the requirements.
Whilst the motherboard doesn't even have USB 3.0 on it anywhere, the GPU has a USB-C connection which the Quest 2 was happy to use.
First up, beatsabre on Steam - yes this works fine as you might imagine on a game that also works natively on my Quest 2 headset. OK let's cut to the chase and try Half Life Alyx...
I ran an MSI AB benchmark on the desktop window display as well as take screenshots of a FPS counter in game.
The in-game counter through the FPSvr app makes it seem to be running much better than it actually was - I was basically maxing out the CPU and GPU all the time at low settings whenever I glanced down at it.
The benchmark of the mirrored desktop of the game revealed this to be the case. I recorded a couple of minutes of exploring and shooting which returned:
Max 73fps (72fps limit on my Quest 2 on this PC)
Average: 71fps
Minimum 27fps
It was just about playable from a motionsickness point of view with the framerate hovering around 70fps based on the counter on my wrist that I could see in real time as moving around. The CPU usage was flat out high and there was stuttering.
Conclusion
In the context of a CPU that (still) costs £25, it's nuts that it can still be used for gaming 13 years later. No, it's not getting 60fps all that much these days but it is quite happy running new games in excess of 30fps. Using it for day to day browsing and watching it is completely usable and quiet.
However that isn't the full story.
Halo Infinite and Deathloop wouldn't boot and due to a lack of instructions ("New AES Instructions" I think). Perhaps something related to anti-cheat as they're both multiplayer games and new single player games didn't complain about this. Depending on what these instructions do it might be the writing on the wall for this CPU. Well, to go along side all the other writings on the wall, such as...
I'm suspecting that the PCI-e 2.0 8GB/s bandwidth was starving the card, hence getting poor framerates whilst CPU and GPU usage was low.
The CPU might cost £25 but decent boards are getting harder to find and you need a decent board to overclock the CPU (well) and whilst my voltages are pretty low and yellow (not pink or red) in the BIOS, my board's VRMs won't be able to cope forever.
It has USB 2.0 only(!), No NVME, SATA-II only (!!), no UEFI, no TPM for Windows 11...
Should you buy this if you're on a very tight budget?
Balls no it makes a lot more sense to instead buy a cheapo 1155 motherboard (£30) and a 4C/8T Xeon 1230 (£20). Quieter, cooler, PCI-e 3.0 (although not with that specific board), the new instructions, UEFI instead of BIOS... In fact I have that board and a 1240 and considering I am still isolating I might put that into the Project PC case to see how it compares.
