Interesting that it doesn't seem that bad still. Would be very interesting to see overclocked results across the board, but this does kind of help paint a picture here. Also good to see some Bulldozer results still. My little brother is rocking an 8130 at 4.5 ghz, and my girlfriend is rocking a 9590 just using boost clocks. Those should be comparable some to the 2600k at those clocks. Reviews like this show it's also possible to do some budget building by getting some last gen hardware.

Great idea and nice review, but is sad that your motherboard (H61) prevents you from doing OC. I guess that a lot of the users that are askng "Is it time for upgrade?" are using that 2600k with OC.

Stocks against stocks fine battle. It's clear that 2600k shows it's age unless you get it oc'd to 4.5 even then it would show it's age.

I'm still happy with my 3570K @4.2GHz. Might upgrade to Ryzen+ or Ryzen2. Mostly depends on the memory prices coming back down...

moeppel:

In a nutshell this is true but bear in mind that general computing tasks (and particularly multitasking) will likely also feel lot better with a modern CPU and platform overall.

They're fast enough though on SB. Watching videos, reading your email, browsing the web, etc. All of these show no "must have" difference between SB and latest gen. If, for example, opening a web page takes 1.7 seconds on SB but 1.3 seconds on latest gen, nobody is going to care, really. Or that the 1GB RAR archive you've downloaded took 3 minutes instead of 2 to unpack, that's not really important either (it's not like you're compressing/unpacking huge archives every day.) In benchmark terms, these are big differences. In human terms, they're quite small and rather unimportant. You also get USB 3 and SATA 3 on Sandy Bridge. It's just not integrated into the CPU. But again, that's not important from an "average user" perspective. All you care about is having USB3 and SATA3, not if they're on-CPU or not. So if you're an average user, and don't need NVMe, Thunderbolt, etc, it's perfectly fine. And if you intend to go for a 4K gaming rig (those 4K HDR displays that have been announced, or the "BFD" ones announced a while back), you're better off spending the money on those + GPU instead, and you can upgrade the platform later, when more games really start demanding more CPU power. Overall, the move to QHD and UHD isn't doing Intel any favors, it seems, and I'm fine with that 😀

great review and a fun comparison with the new processors. Thanks for taking the time to do an "oldy but goody"!

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:

Wish it didn't require a import tax to send you anything. I would send you a Z68 board I have sitting at the house to use.

It would be awesome if you do that loophole! A heavely OC'd 2600k would give us a Clock to Clock notion of improvement. PS: Your picture its from a awesome album! Circa Survive - The Amulet! Best Regards!

Loophole35:

Wish it didn't require a import tax to send you anything. I would send you a Z68 board I have sitting at the house to use.

If you send it via normal mail he'd still have to pay taxes? I thought he wouldn't have to pay any tax if you sent it to him for free (no invoice)? Just curious.

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.

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...

Loophole35:

Wish it didn't require a import tax to send you anything. I would send you a Z68 board I have sitting at the house to use.

Thanks mate, but I've dropped ASUS a note, somebody is looking in the stock keeping trenches right now to see if they can find a P67 or Z68. With a bit of luck, we'll be able to do a proper OC update.

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.

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.

If you guys bothered to: A) actually read the review B) check up this thread You would have found the answers you are complaining about.

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.

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.

Endymion:

Does there really exist people that use 2600k at stock clocks? What's the point of review? Let's make strawpoll and ask 2600k owners at what clocks do they use this CPU. I think 90% of users would use it under OC conditions. And where is more processor oriented games like BF1 etc. ? MAX and LOW FPS? ..

Who cares?...;) Don't like what the bar charts tell you, but you like the performance you get with your current hardware? Good--so stop reading the bar-chart, frames-per-second sections in cpu reviews. (Your insecurities are showing...) Sure, you may be right that most people still using older platforms/cpus do indeed OC--but you have forgotten that the same rule applies to people using the latest hardware as well, I guess. So...the approximate performance ratios hold, oc'ing included. I was happy with my FX-8320e for years, but overclocked or not, it is no match for my current R5 1600...(which overclocks to 3.8GHz with a simple multiplier change.) Still, as HH demonstrated, it's not just the cpu--the entire platform changes when upgrading. The good part of that is the performance increases--the bad part, of course, is the expense. Depending on which cpu you opt for, DDR4 ram can cost as much as the cpu, if not more. But even with older hardware, if you game at decent resolutions like 2560x1440 and up, you are limited to the performance of the GPU and it almost doesn't matter which cpu you use these days--or GPU, for that matter--as performance differences among GPUs at QHD and up are small indeed. But is ~$600 (for new motherboard, ram, and cpu) really too much to spend on a new computer? Replace just those three components--keep the rest--and a "new computer" is what you get.

waltc3:

Who cares?...;) Don't like what the bar charts tell you, but you like the performance you get with your current hardware? Good--so stop reading the bar-chart, frames-per-second sections in cpu reviews. (Your insecurities are showing...) Sure, you may be right that most people still using older platforms/cpus do indeed OC--but you have forgotten that the same rule applies to people using the latest hardware as well, I guess. So...the approximate performance ratios hold, oc'ing included. I was happy with my FX-8320e for years, but overclocked or not, it is no match for my current R5 1600...(which overclocks to 3.8GHz with a simple multiplier change.) Still, as HH demonstrated, it's not just the cpu--the entire platform changes when upgrading. The good part of that is the performance increases--the bad part, of course, is the expense. Depending on which cpu you opt for, DDR4 ram can cost as much as the cpu, if not more. But even with older hardware, if you game at decent resolutions like 2560x1440 and up, you are limited to the performance of the GPU and it almost doesn't matter which cpu you use these days--or GPU, for that matter--as performance differences among GPUs at QHD and up are small indeed. But is ~$600 (for new motherboard, ram, and cpu) really too much to spend on a new computer? Replace just those three components--keep the rest--and a "new computer" is what you get.

Especially like that last part. If my current ddr3 2133 cl9 memory couldn't do 2400 cl10, yeah I'd be singing a different song.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

Thanks mate, but I've dropped ASUS a note, somebody is looking in the stock keeping trenches right now to see if they can find a P67 or Z68. With a bit of luck, we'll be able to do a proper OC update.

Wouldn't it be more likely they had some Z77 boards laying around? If I remember right, the difference between Z68 & Z77 was USB 3.0 integration with the Z77 boards.