Kaby Lake 7700K vs Sandy Bridge 2600K IPC Review @ [H]

It matches up pretty well with the numbers on cpubenchmark.net .

I went from an i7 920 that I had for around 4-5yrs (oc'd to 3.8 around year 2) to an i7 6700k. It wasn't an earth shattering difference in the apps I use.

The only practical reason I had for doing this:

- My dad needed a newer PC (got my 920).
- I wanted the newer technology (UEFI, USB3.1, DDR4, etc.).
- Better power management / usage.

If you already have a working 2600k, I don't see it as must have unless you're looking for those things.

For the curious, my workflow includes Fusion360, 3DSMax, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere (occasionally Handbrake), VirtualBox, and Solitaire. Sometimes a few games.
 
From the enthusiast's perspective, not much as changed. Because we're still looking at 4 core, 8 thread. Look more broadly at what can be done with a single socket.

E5-2687, the fastest you could get - 8 core, 16 thread, 3.1ghz. (24.8ghz is how VMWare will lay it out for you)

To now, the E5-2699, 22 core, 44 thread, 2.4ghz. (52.8ghz, or 2.12x the amount of compute, not counting the IPC improvements)
 
2600k on a 1080 EVGA Hybrid here... I am going for the monitor next, which I found amusing after reading Kyle's "GPU then monitor, then GPU then monitor" message for an earlier poster. I concur!
 
Thanks Kyle, way to ruin all my fun working out a new build. Thanks for the great report, I have never liked or owned AMD stuff but always wished them to be competitive. My neighbor is a big AMD fan and we have fun trying to best each others system with similar parts.
If Ryzen is even a close competitor I will buy one just for support to AMD. My money is staying in the can in the yard until something fries or intel improves substantially.
 
I've been running my 2500k at 5ghz under water for years now and have never skipped a beat. Even when i look at new video card upgrades, i glance at cpus and collecatively shrug as buying a new mobo/memory/cooling setup just for a cpu upgrade is pointless. I play games, A LOT OF GAME. I don't do other threaded bullshit and will continue to play games. Even today this chip gives me all the performance I could need short of running a full 4k double titan setup, and even that I bet would be fine. As an original Athalon FX owner that paid somewhere around 650-800$ for it back in the day, I'm really interested in what amd has cooking on the ryzen front, if they can deliver identical performance plus overclockability under 400$ for a cpu/mobo combo.
 
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Good article. Thanks for confirming that my keeping of my 2700K was a good choice. Cranks out stable 4.9GHz on a AIO watercooler.
 
Actually I purchased an entire i7 920 system for $20 last month, that system would be more than enough for a majority of consumers.
 
I am not an overclocker, so I wish these showdowns would show comparisons at stock speeds. I have a 2600k running at stock speeds and would love to know what kind of performance improvement I can expect moving to a 7700k at stock.
 
Cantroy said:
2600k on a 1080 EVGA Hybrid here... I am going for the monitor next, which I found amusing after reading Kyle's "GPU then monitor, then GPU then monitor" message for an earlier poster. I concur!
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It really is all about pixels and accelerating those at a pace that you are comfortable with.
 
Thanks for putting this together guys! Figured it wouldnt be a huge advantage, but only 20-25% in 5 years is sad. Looking forward to Ryzen to bring back some competition. At this rate, I think my 4930K @ 4.6 will last me a good long time. Looking forward to the realworld gaming tests as well, good job fellas!
 
Raymond Garrett said:
I am not an overclocker, so I wish these showdowns would show comparisons at stock speeds. I have a 2600k running at stock speeds and would love to know what kind of performance improvement I can expect moving to a 7700k at stock.
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I think there is a full review of exactly what you want right here.
 
You know, since you did all this work, you might as well include the 2600k results on the sure to be upcoming Ryzen review..
 
Great article Kyle! I always like a look back at history even if recent.

I have a working Presler core Pentium 955 setup I'll send your way if you want to go waaay back ;). Had it at 4.2 on air and it's still hot as hell and slow to boot!
 
great review. goes to show, intel fans will buy a new proc with just a 22% difference over the previous proc. wtg fans!
 
Raymond Garrett said:
I am not an overclocker, so I wish these showdowns would show comparisons at stock speeds. I have a 2600k running at stock speeds and would love to know what kind of performance improvement I can expect moving to a 7700k at stock.
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Well, IPC is roughly 20% better and stock for stock the 7700k is 800mhz faster so you tell me what kind of performance you think you would see. Pretty obvious Id say.
 
elites2012 said:
great review. goes to show, intel fans will buy a new proc with just a 22% difference over the previous proc. wtg fans!
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You forget that KL most likely clocks better than SB for the majority of people, you get a MUCH newer chipset option with some great features, and a processor that has not been abused for 6 years. While I wont get KL as I just picked up a 6700k not too long ago, I did gain about 10% FPS going from SB to SL depending upon the game with a 400mhz lower clock speed. Seems like a win to me.

Its not always about being a "fan" but it would seem you created your account for obvious reasons.......
 
I think it's not necessarily the CPU performance that has driven upgrades, but the connectivity options, m.2, nvme, usb 3.0/3.1 in native controllers, high end sata buses, more pci-e lanes for particular builds/add-in cards. For a long time I haven't been looking at CPUs, but rather at platforms as a whole.

It's a shame, I've got 3-5 year old equipment all over my technology and have little to no need to replace it. Unfortunately I'm also aiming to build a new gaming desktop and as such I will be waiting for RyZen, like everyone else...
 
0ptional said:
I think it's not necessarily the CPU performance that has driven upgrades, but the connectivity options, m.2, nvme, usb 3.0/3.1 in native controllers, high end sata buses, more pci-e lanes for particular builds/add-in cards. For a long time I haven't been looking at CPUs, but rather at platforms as a whole.
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I've been looking at that, too. m.2, USB 3.0, etc. look very attractive. It's a big part of my upgrade list. But, CPU performance is still top of the list.
 
Great article.

When you do real-world gaming comparisons, it would be really great if you could test frame times. That area has seen a huge improvement going from Sandy Bridge all the way up to Skylake/Kaby Lake, though unfortunately it doesn't get a lot of spotlight as it's fairly expensive to test.

Showing FPS numbers are an interesting comparison, but they don't really mean much if the performance is a stuttering mess due to the cpu not being able to keep up.

PCPer does a great round-up of frame time benchmarks in their analysis. You can see how much Sandy Bridge struggles as you try to move beyond the 60hz range.
 
0ptional said:
I think it's not necessarily the CPU performance that has driven upgrades, but the connectivity options, m.2, nvme, usb 3.0/3.1 in native controllers, high end sata buses, more pci-e lanes for particular builds/add-in cards. For a long time I haven't been looking at CPUs, but rather at platforms as a whole.

It's a shame, I've got 3-5 year old equipment all over my technology and have little to no need to replace it. Unfortunately I'm also aiming to build a new gaming desktop and as such I will be waiting for RyZen, like everyone else...
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This is exactly what pushed me from my still sufficient Phenom II build onto Haswell. The single threaded performance on the Phenom was NOT holding me back... but damn, that chipset was showing its age and mITX AM3 motherboards pretty much didn't exist anymore by then.
 
Xebec_ said:
I think Project Cars is one game that a [email protected] will show a benefit over a [email protected] if using a 980ti OC or faster card..
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There are a few games out there that will show improvements from upgrading your CPU but they are definitely few and far between. I saw big improvements in ARMA 3 and Planetside 2 going from a 2500K @ 4.6ghz to my 6700K @ 4.6ghz, especially the minimum framerates. However most games will be GPU limited or not limited at all (Source Engine stuff, Blizzard stuff, Indie games, etc). ARMA 3 is apparently limited by memory bandwidth too, not just IPC, so some of the difference comes from DDR4 generally having higher bandwidth/clocks than DDR3.

I also saw huge gains in video encoding (double the performance) but most of that was probably from hyper-threading and AVX rather than pure IPC.
 
elites2012 said:
great review. goes to show, intel fans will buy a new proc with just a 22% difference over the previous proc. wtg fans!
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tunatime said:
So not even a 5% bump a year. We should have that 20% every year or two
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We "should have" whatever we are willing to pay for. Intel has no competition, so its doing the best it can to spend as little as possible to make as much as possible, but if they put out a product and charged $400 for it, and you (or someone else) paid for it, then intel was right to charge that.
 
Ur_Mom said:
I've been looking at that, too. m.2, USB 3.0, etc. look very attractive. It's a big part of my upgrade list. But, CPU performance is still top of the list.
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CPU performance I'd argue (and this pretty much shows) has been peaked for quite a while, it's our interfaces to the CPUs that give us visible daily performance upgrades, high end m.2 drives w/ 2gbps r/w vs an older sata 2 ssd like the original Intel G2 80/160gb drives.

rat said:
This is exactly what pushed me from my still sufficient Phenom II build onto Haswell. The single threaded performance on the Phenom was NOT holding me back... but damn, that chipset was showing its age and mITX AM3 motherboards pretty much didn't exist anymore by then.
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Yeah, it's the niceties of little things like boot speeds and updated UEFI interfaces, better power efficiency, native USB/etc.. My MBP is Ivy Bridge, my work E6530 is also Ivy Bridge, my TS440 is a Haswell Xeon (Quad w/HT), all work perfectly, have great USB controllers, etc.. It's the early i7 9x0 and 2x00's that really suffered in these departments. At least all of my machines have SATA 6G...
 
>If you own a highly clocked 2600K/2500K Sandy Bridge processor and it is still giving you stable performance, it is hard for me to make the argument that it is time for you to upgrade, especially if you are a GPU-limited gamer.

Basically any new game at actual gamer's resolution of 1080 or 1440p, becomes GPU limited for most GPUs. So yeah, I still have a 2600K @ 4.4ghz rig myself and it handles all the new games excellent. If I were to plug in a GTX 1080, it would still not be CPU bound, due to Ultra settings 1440p.

So since 2011, Intel has not given a good reason for 2500K and 2600K owners to upgrade, for gaming.

The bright side of this, is that gamers can save a ton of money sticking with their old z68 platform for that long.
 
It would be interesting to see some testing to try to determine CPU limited situations. It seems like every time someone in the GPU forum asks about an upgrade and he is still using a 2500k everyone jumps on him and belittles anyone who says that the 2500k is still relevant. According to most people in that subforum a 2500k is a giant bottleneck on a card like a GTX 1080. You have a GTX 770 and you want to know if you should upgrade to a GTX 1070 but you still have a 2500k, OMG, wtf are you thinking, upgrade your CPU instead because your 2500k will just bottleneck a gtx 1070 massively.

Anyway, thanks for the review. You basically just confirmed what I suspected. As I don't do any encoding there isn't really any pressing reason for me to upgrade to kaby lake. Let's see what AMD can do.
 
Gorilla said:
It would be interesting to see some testing to try to determine CPU limited situations. It seems like every time someone in the GPU forum asks about an upgrade and he is still using a 2500k everyone jumps on him and belittles anyone who says that the 2500k is still relevant. According to most people in that subforum a 2500k is a giant bottleneck on a card like a GTX 1080. You have a GTX 770 and you want to know if you should upgrade to a GTX 1070 but you still have a 2500k, OMG, wtf are you thinking, upgrade your CPU instead because your 2500k will just bottleneck a gtx 1070 massively.

Anyway, thanks for the review. You basically just confirmed what I suspected. As I don't do any encoding there isn't really any pressing reason for me to upgrade to kaby lake. Let's see what AMD can do.
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A 2500k could be a *slight* bottleneck in certain games that tend to be CPU bound, or in certain games MP modes. But for the most part, it's still going to get 90-95% of the 1080's maximum performance out of it.

Again, it's not that newer CPUs aren't faster, it's that they older ones are "fast enough" to max the GPU.

The one CPU I wish we could also benchmark: The i7 920. Not sure how well that holds up in comparison to the 2600k.

And yes, you end up saving a lot of money over the course of the platform because the CPU is good enough for gaming. [I'm one of those 2600k/1080 GTX people FYI]. Over the same period the 2600k has been out, how many users on the other side of the aisle have had multiple CPU/Platform updates to try and reach the same performance? I don't view that as cheaper.
 
0ptional said:
CPU performance I'd argue (and this pretty much shows) has been peaked for quite a while, it's our interfaces to the CPUs that give us visible daily performance upgrades, high end m.2 drives w/ 2gbps r/w vs an older sata 2 ssd like the original Intel G2 80/160gb drives.
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Yea, I'm really eyeing one of those Samsung m.2 drives.

Just hard to pull the trigger when I'm not really that bad right now. My son build a newer machine (6700K) with a standard SSD. It's faster than mine, noticeably. But, I wouldn't say it's $800 noticeable...

Even with a better HDD, I don't know if I could justify the cost.
 
Minor typo on 2nd page ("Kabylake vs Skylake ICP Review" --> IPC)

Thanks for doing this. Maybe now the idiots crowing about Kaby/Skylake like its the second coming will STFU.
~25% faster absolute performance is not like upgrading from a frickin' Zilog Z80!

gamerk2 said:
The one CPU I wish we could also benchmark: The i7 920. Not sure how well that holds up in comparison to the 2600k.
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Easy - not as well for two reasons.
1) Doesn't clock as high as Sandy
2) ~10% lower IPC

1 + 2 together kind of kills Nehalem / Westmere. Now if we're talking about them compared to a non-HT Sandy, then it's somewhat of a tossup.
 
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For a "casual" like me, it amazing to see that the tech hasn't really advanced further than it has.

Hopefully, my 3770 has several more years of viability :D

I'm not a fan of AMD, but competition is always a good thing.
 
Excellent reviews. I'm really looking forward to the VR review too. There have been some fun VR games in the past few months. I can't wait to see the Ryzen performance tests and overclocks in the coming months. I'm interested in how many M.2 NVMe slots Ryzen and Skylake-X motherboards will support this year because that could be one reason to upgrade.
 
Yeah, this is what I thought.

Now, OCed the 2600K to 5Ghz and the Kaby Lake might go behind.

I've been running my 2500K 4.7Ghz 24/7 since it got released. It hasn't let me down. I will probably cry when the times comes to dissemble it.
 
Im still chilling here with a Bloomfield i7 920 (mediocre 3.6Ghz overclock) and still dont see a need to upgrade.
GTX 1080 and an Acer XB321HK and I can play all my games at 4k.
TBH Im more interested in upgrading mobos to get an M.2 drive than I am getting a new cpu.

Ive said it the last 3 generations of cpu, maybe Ill upgrade NEXT generation...
 
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