6700K OC vs 5820K OC vs 5960x OC

[Carfax83]

Eurogamer finally did a face off between an overclocked 6700K, 5820K and 5960x..

Results surprised me a bit. Looks like Skylake's IPC is great enough to edge out the Haswell-E CPUs in raw performance. However, most of the games they tested weren't very amenable to hex core and greater CPUs.

Sure they tested AC Unity and Crysis 3, which are known to scale well on hex core CPUs. But this is only in certain areas in the game. From the video it looks like they tested the in engine cutscenes, likely to reduce variances.

Not sure how using scripted scenes would affect the results, but I'm betting it probably did reduce the CPU factor compared to actual gameplay.

 

[lehtv]

They should've tested with 980 Ti SLI with both cards heavily OC'd. Titan X and 980 SLI at stock aren't really enough to bottleneck any of these CPU's except in rare situations. I doubt a i5-6500 would've differed much from the stock i7-6700K results.

Also, with DX12 around the corner, the conclusion "i7-6700K is the fastest gaming CPU" is a little premature... or at least they may have to revisit that conclusion rather soon. Shame they didn't even mention DX12 anywhere in the article.

 

[Deders]

I would have thought the reduced CPU overheads in DX12 would equate to less CPU power needed overall.

 

[therealnickdanger]

I would have thought the reduced CPU overheads in DX12 would equate to less CPU power needed overall.

I thought DX12 brought about better multi-core performance, not reduced overhead. So the high single-core overhead of pre-DX12 is now spread out more evenly. Am I wrong?

 

[lehtv]

Isn't it about both? Less overhead -> less CPU-dependent performance. But better threading -> more potential for 6 core CPUs to outperform 4 core CPUs, given sufficiently powerful GPUs and sufficiently CPU-heavy games.

 

[Deders]

It does both, but if there is less overhead to spread over the cores, more cores on high end cpu's aren't necessarily going to see an advantage.

On the other hand Amd's 6 and 8 core FX series will most likely benefit from both optimisations because of the IPC disadvantage for each of the cores.

 

[tweakboy]

Haswell-E still looks good.

 

[know of fence]

So despite more than twice the bandwidth for Haswell-E, Skylake managed to improve things by single digit, thanks to IPC ... Far Cry is a bit of an outlier. Also they don't tell us which latency RAM was used, which may be crucial in this kind of edge case. Eurogamer remains a crappy advertising / misinformation site as they desperately seek to confirm Skylake as the best gaming CPU. :thumbsdown:

 

[Sweepr]

Pretty much all the games tested can take advantage of >4C/8T to some degree, yet Skylake is still on top. This time there's no 'slower memory excuse' (DC DDR4-3000 vs QC DDR4-3200). Sure, blame the website if the results doesn't match your expectations.

BTW I'm sure Intel would rather promote more expensive HEDT parts for gamers.

I wish they had tested 2016 games but I doubt it would make much of a difference, and it remains to be seen how DX12 will affect this balance. Also worth pointing out that Skylake generally hits higher clocks than Haswell-E (I settled at 4.4GHz 24/7 with my Core i7-5820K).

 

[MordiaE]

An interesting video

http://youtu.be/HOevOiJUQAE

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yea, the cpu with the best ipc gives the fastest results at equal or very slightly faster clocks. Intel must have bought off the testers to get such an absurd result.

Back to reality, too bad they did not test the 6600k as well, or even instead of the 5960x. I think most people realize 5960x is not even close to a cost effective gaming solution, while for midrange builds, it would be nice to see how a non HT quad performs.

 

[Deders]

An interesting video

http://youtu.be/HOevOiJUQAE

That is very interesting, although when I run it I don't see anywhere near 50‰ usage of my 4c8t. I'll give it another run with graphics at minimal and get back to you.

 

[Face2Face]

Is anyone really surprised? Even the the 4790K ends up being faster in most games vs. the 5820K.

http://techbuyersguru.com/quad-vs-hex-showdown-core-i7-4790k-vs-5820k-games

There really isn't many games that will utilize all 12 threads, and until there is, the 6700K will always be a better gaming CPU. I do wish they would've at least shown us the min FPS though.

 

[Deders]

When I initially set everything to its lowest setting I booted back in and ran the tests without realising that it had actually set most settings to medium, with some still left on high. The CPU usage for this mostly hovered within the 35-50% range (monitoring using Rivatuner Statistics server on my keyboard's display) It sometimes peaked at 60%+ for very short periods, and dipped as low as 26% again for short periods.

When I reset everything to minimum for the 2nd time, checked the settings had stuck, I saw the CPU usage hover between 45-60%, it did go above 70% more often and even got as high as 90+% for very short periods. There was still a point it hit the mid 20's for a small section.

Granted my GPU is not really optimal for this game. Does anyone know what GPU and settings they used in the video?

 

[Face2Face]

That is very interesting, although when I run it I don't see anywhere near 50‰ usage of my 4c8t. I'll give it another run with graphics at minimal and get back to you.

I'll have to try this out as well. We have the same video cards, so it should be interesting.

 

[podspi]

Yea, the cpu with the best ipc gives the fastest results at equal or very slightly faster clocks. Intel must have bought off the testers to get such an absurd result.

Back to reality, too bad they did not test the 6600k as well, or even instead of the 5960x. I think most people realize 5960x is not even close to a cost effective gaming solution, while for midrange builds, it would be nice to see how a non HT quad performs.

Yep. I'd imagine that while a lot of games can take advantage of more than 4 cores, the usage of those cores is probably a lot lower, so HT may get you a lot of bang for your buck, so to speak.

 

[Deders]

Yep. I'd imagine that while a lot of games can take advantage of more than 4 cores, the usage of those cores is probably a lot lower, so HT may get you a lot of bang for your buck, so to speak.

Tbh when monitoring CPU performance in game, most games stay at around 25% or 2 cores. These are games that would make good use of all 4 of my old i5 750.

 

[bystander36]

I would not expect to see an advantage in gaming with an i7 5820K or i7 5960x for a little while, but you can also see the difference is small atm. I do think there is a good chance that in 5 years that the higher core count will start to win out. Highly threaded games are just starting to show up, but in time I'd expect to see more of it. When these CPU's are starting to fall behind the newer systems in IPC, the added cores may very well help the 6 and 8 core CPU's stay competitive.

 

[SPBHM]

6700K is a tiny (specially if you ignore the IGP) monster :thumbsup:

I think the conclusion you can make for this is that for gaming you are better upgrading often, to have the latest Intel architecture, and not really going to big these days, due to them using an older architecture for the higher end platform...

a "5960X" Skylake (8c, 20MB l3) would be great

but realistically both 5820K and 5960X did great to, and are a lot faster for other stuff, so yes...

fast CPUs are fast.

 

[Madpacket]

If price is the same, what would you buy?

A HEDT X99 w/5820K with room to expand up to 128GB and 10 core Broadwell or a questionable Z10 platform (what 1151 socket upgrades are guaranteed??) with strict limits on core count and RAM?

One gives you a minor increase today for IPC for non DX12 games, while the other platform will likely scale better with DX12 with the added core counts. I would rather build a system that will last a few more years when spending this much money. Oh and the HEDT is better for any other task that requires multiple cores / threads (video / 3d rendering etc).

 

[Geforce man]

Not going to lie, this benchmark did surprise me a little bit. I was hoping that the 6 and 8 cores would crush the 4cores, so I'd have a reason to justify a huge overhaul. Maybe i'll just get a case upgrade and rewire / clean everything to tide me over for awhile.

 

[SPBHM]

If price is the same, what would you buy?

5960X for sure, simply because it's going to stay relevant for longer I think, and it's much faster for converting my videos to x265

as for gaming, it's not all that much slower anyway.

 

[MrTeal]

Pretty much all the games tested can take advantage of >4C/8T to some degree, yet Skylake is still on top. This time there's no 'slower memory excuse' (DC DDR4-3000 vs QC DDR4-3200). Sure, blame the website if the results doesn't match your expectations.

BTW I'm sure Intel would rather promote more expensive HEDT parts for gamers.

I wish they had tested 2016 games but I doubt it would make much of a difference, and it remains to be seen how DX12 will affect this balance. Also worth pointing out that Skylake generally hits higher clocks than Haswell-E (I settled at 4.4GHz 24/7 with my Core i7-5820K).

It would be really interesting to see them disable two cores on the 5820k and add a 4C/8T HSW-E comparison into the mix.

 

[Erithan13]

It would also be interesting to disable HT on the 6700k to see what sort of gains it actually provides. It's a great comparison nonetheless although I feel they could have done with an i5 in there. I don't think many people look to hexcores or octocores for a gaming rig while 6600k vs 6700k is much more often discussed.

I'll bet 4c/8t remains fine for gaming as long as the current gen of consoles are around. It's the old future proofing problem again, I suspect at some point the 5820k will be beating the 6700k in games, but by then both cpus and platforms will be old hat and you could get a cpu with equal/more cores than the 5820 and better IPC than the 6700.

 

[Dasa2]

seems there tests are fairly gpu limited
crysis 120-124fps stock and overclocked vs this review where a stock 5820k manages 61fps vs 6700k 50fps
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/940-15/cpu-jeux-3d-crysis-3-arma-iii.html
crysis is a bad example though as even when it is cpu limited it seems some levels can only make use of <4 cores while others take a serious hit from only having 4 cores so much so that ht can improve avg fps beyond what its capable of even in rendering

x99 can do some funny things to performance with different memory settings so without knowing the settings used...

there older 6600k\6700k review shows little difference between them other than 80-88fps in gtav with a 100mhz advantage
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-intel-skylake-core-i7-6700k-review