Retro review: Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7 2600K - 2018 review
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DeskStar
liesenberg
Awesome review! I love retro reviews, since it gives us a nice view of the progress made so far and and also how todays games and applications are performing on these processors!
It's very understadable that at stock speeds these processors are far behind at 1080p or lower but since you combine these generations of processors with a 1070/1060(6GB) or RX 570/580 (8GB) I think for the most people out there it should be more than enough. People outside of the real competitive arena are aiming for 60/75Hz witch is something that these processors still can handle well. (Since I live in Brazil I talk the reality here where any hardware is very expensive... especially monitors.)
Just for the sake of comparison, I use a i7 875k @4.0 16G w/XMP(v1.3) at 1600 and I play a lot of Overwatch nowdays... my FPS averages from 132 to 88 in really heavy fights, my GPU is 95% of the time at 100% since I run the game on Epic settings at 100% rendering scale.
When my GPU its not as 100% it dips to like 95% usage for a brief moment but I dont feel any ingame hiccups or anything that interferes with my gaming experience... the game feels and plays butter smooth.
I know the 1060 that I use is most likely the last GPU that my platform is going to see since a newer mid end tier card would probably be heavely bottlenecked by the CPU and memory bandwith of an older platform.
Later at night i will post my AIDA64 results with my platform just for the sake of comparison.
Thanks again Hilbert for this review.
It made my day!
Best regards to all!
Loophole35
liesenberg
StewieTech
Great review boss, neat little idea. The 2600k is still pretty capable so its an all around gangsta product alright.
fantaskarsef
airbud7
Great thread Boss! (brilliant) ....Thanks!
Fender178
It's good that the 2600k is still holding strong after 7 years. I feel the users who still own the older i5s might need an upgrade depending on the games they want to play.
ubercake
This is a great article.
Someone needed to do this and it provides a great service to all gamers, but I'm thinking Intel, AMD, nor any motherboard producers like to see articles telling people they don't necessarily need to upgrade their architectures after 7 years. What I say to them is give us a reason to want to upgrade. A real reason.
I'm running at 1440p and know there's no illusion that I'm getting just at or close to any gaming benchmark number in 2560x1440 with my good ol' 3930K and GTX 1080. This processor has been out since Q4 of 2011! I'm getting my money's worth out of this bad boy. It's also served a dual-purpose as a DAW this whole time. Sure I could improve my DAW performance with an upgrade, but it's easily acceptable in it's current format.
If I gave a couple of craps about synthetic benchmarks and improving my score therein, I'd have to upgrade pronto. Since I don't, no need to upgrade at this point unless one of my core components dies from old age.
fantaskarsef
My last CPU befroe my current one (i7-950) did me good services for 6 years too, and is still running in my HTPC, I just upgrade because I wanted to have all the other goodies like SATA3.0, PCIe 3.0, etc.
I too think that HH did the gamers a good service, showing also those who do not have SB or IB processors that they were really good. Back in the day, when Intel made CPUs that lasted you for years...
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Administrator
Dragondale13
3930K here also!
Great article, but like the person above, it only matters for synthetic benchmarks.
With buggy games being released all the time (I'll blame devs) most people use Vsync, Gsync or Freesync with a frame cap, along with custom resolutions and Dsr.
Not to mention the tons of vram at our disposal compared to just a few generations ago.
Relatively easy to live with a cpu bottleneck in 2018 imo.
Even with the slowdown from Spectre/Meltdown patches, my present gaming experience is still excellent at 2160p.
Fox2232
squalles
no overclocked performance to comparison? because 2600k have low clock and higher oc capacity, i using one 2700k with 4.7ghz 1.35v and gtx 1080 in stock clock (50mhz by factory in core clock) and make 138fps avg in rise of tomb raider in fullhd maxed settings and 467 points in single performance in cpu-z
craycray
A fair test on a 'k' SKU chip with an extremely high over clocking potential, would have been OC to 4.6-4.7GHz with a decent spec 1866 memory from 2011. This test might as well have been done on a 2600.
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Administrator
Embra
I thought this to be a test of comparing architecture changes over the years, not really OCing. He could have OCed all of the cpus for that matter.
Silva
Great review, as always.
I still rock my 2500k. Had it overclocked @4.0Ghz but didn't feel the need to so stock again for now.
My bottleneck is the RX560 for sure so wile I wait for a replacement, the old i5 still rocks everything I game on.
For gaming, it would be stupid to spend the money. Specially because of DDR4 price.
If you need the productivity, then it's another story.
waltc3
Muaddib
wow i cannot believe you guys didnt include the Legendary 2700K mine's still operational at 4.8 Ghz and its easily faster than my buddy's 4770K.
Yes my newly AMD 2600X order will be way faster but only in multythreading and multitasking operations.