[Test] Is It Time To Upgrade Your Core i5 2500K?

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It's not that there isn't the realisation that the newer processors aren't faster, just that there hasn't really beeen a gain worthwhile apart from the inclusion of AVX2 etc. Apparently Intel are looking at a 'new' x86 instruction set. Most likely this will just be the removal of all non AVX etc instructions from the processor and any use of those instructions would be done by emulation. The soonest this will likely happen is with Ice Lake, the modified version of Cannonlake for desktop computers. It might not be until after Ice Lake though. The reason for doing this is it saves space on the chip.

Coffee Lake will likely be a bit of a boost over Kaby Lake as it isn't supposedly just a refresh, but I don't expect too much gain either. Cannonlake will still 'exist' in part with Ice Lake, so the performance of Coffee Lake would likely be less. However, Cannonlake will be used on low powered devices (it's the high frequencies that don't work with the architecture currently), so Coffee Lake would have to perform well against those. The six-core looks interesting, but again the cost couldn't be so cheap as to devalue their enthusiast socket 2011 platform.

In the meantime, Zen will be getting a refresh next year (Zen+) with a 10 percent IPC gain, with the potential, as so far rumoured, to be going to a new process, for example 7 nm or 10 nm, in 2018 with further improvements (and updated socket, likely backwards compatible but most benefits with a new board), followed by another one with at least 10 percent IPC boost. This is important as Ice Lake will likely be going against this third gen Zen, which is rumoured to see at least 20 percent gain over release Zen, if not more, and not including the benefits of any additional instruction sets. The fourth gen Zen will release when Ice Lake is still around then competing against Tiger Lake (Ice Lake Refresh).

So basically, Zen is not only the most attractive, at least to me, option this year, but looking forward for at least 4 years due to the improvements already in the planning. Supposedly the Zen replacement is already on the drawing board, likely without native x86 code like future Intel's (unless they get rid of it sooner). There is also suggestion of future CPU's resembling, at least in part, to GPU's in terms of architecture and parellel processing.

In any case, the stagnation of tech is soon to come to an end with Zen, and also Vega GPU's (well, technically I guess the Nvidia GTX 10xx series and Radeon 4xx series was the beginning of this) which as some interesting architectural changes, such as how it utilises memory etc (an 8 GB Vega would be even more of an overkill for anything less than 4K).

So unfortunately for Intel the first 'worthy' upgrade is likely Coffee Lake, and if you're not Intel-only, Zen.

 

It's not all negative though. The money I would have spent on platform upgrades I instead could spent on GPUs...

Actually, I like that there's been no huge progress since Sandy. Good for my wallet I have never in the past stayed on the same CPU for 6 years.

 

From that GamerNexus video, the 2500k, even at 4.5ghz is getting spanked by the 6600k/7600k most of the time. Time to upgrade indeed, waiting to see how Ryzen turns out. Not getting my hopes up though.

 

Mine is fine at 4.2.

 

Why is that? Try to push it more. My reaches 4.7 easy with 1.38v and i can use it at 4.8ghz but it needs 1.4v+.

Btw, eclap highly overclocked 2500k + fast ram isnt getting spanked by stock 6600/7600k. Its more or less have similiar performance.

 

Nah, it still looses quite considerably and you can't really use fast ram with a Sandy.

 

You can use up to 2133mhz and if you watched the op video (from DF) you'll see Sandy still benefit much from faster ram. Standard reviews do not bother with. Im sure nexus was testing with stock ram/clocks.

 

I run 4.2 at 1.2v. Going to 4.3 isn't stable, and I tried up to 1.27v. So it's probably my mainboard (MSI P67A-C43.) It's not an OC mainboard (you can tell since max vcore setting is 1.35v; OC mainboards allow much higher than that.)

In any event, 4.2GHz is good enough. Runs pretty much every game and doesn't seem to bottleneck my GPU. If I had any issues whatsoever, I would have already upgraded to a newer platform. Money isn't the issue, it's that I still don't have a reason to upgrade since everything runs fine

 

That's fair play mate, my 2500k still runs most games perfectly fine but in MMOs and race sims, a beefier cpu coupled with a lot faster ram yields some benefits. If it wasn't for these games, I would not even consider upgrading, but going from 35fps to 50fps in some games is massive for me.

 

The only reason that I can see for anyone to upgrade from Sandybridge to Skylake or Kabylake or even Ryzen if their motherboard is starting to show signs of death no matter how far they lower their OC it acts up.

With my rig I upgraded from a C2Q Q6600 to my i7 that I have now. And I hope to keep my current rig for 5+ years and make the GPU upgrade ever so often.

I own a Dell Precision m4600 laptop from 2011 and it has a SandyBridge i7 2820QM which is one of them mobile quad chips and it is a beast of a of a laptop for the money I paid for it.

 

Just going from a q6600 @ 3.75 ghz to a i7 950 @ 4.1ghz was massive.
6GB DDR2 800 vs 12GB DDR3 1600 was big too.

In my testing 4 cores is not enough anymore for anything older then i5 4570k @ 4.5ghz.

When I ran my 3930k with 4 threads at 4.6 it struggled alot more then 6 threads at 3.6.

 

Yeah, the 6C/12T 6800k is actually only some £50 more than the 7700k, it looks pretty strong on paper. Probably a better buy than the 7700k.

 

My friend was kind to hook me up with his old parts i7 2700K, 660ti for free. How future proof is the CPU? I'm looking to replace the gpu later this year. Would a 1060 GTX be bottlenecked by a OC'ed 2700K? If the i5 2500k still fares well I guess the i7 2700K is more than enough for the time being?

 

You are perfectly fine with i7 2700K, as games tend to favor more and more multi-threading over the raw single thread power. GTX 1060 would very likely be the donkey as you go higher on resolution scale.

 

Thanks man. I'll mainly game in 1080p but I do have two 1440p monitors from my old build that will be of use. I guess that at that resolution some bottleneck will be noticed?

 

It depends on the game, of course, but in general GTX 1060/RX 480 will have a hard time with two 1440p monitors.

P.S. I feel like we are stealing the thread

 

Yeah that is where your 1060 would struggle using 2 1440p monitors. 1070/1080 would be the cards of choice for that resolution because you would be over 4k @ 2880p depending on the settings of said game and how greatly or poorly optimized said game is. But even then the 1070 and the 1080 would probably struggle beyond 4K.

 

That's the kind of situation I'm in right now.

My 2600k started off with a P67 board, then later (after that board had died) I upgraded it to a Z77, then later to a different Z77 after that board had gone sour also. Now, my current board is showing issues again... (I guess they don't like to sit around in idle for way too long with sparse venting from my low rpm fans).
I tried to upgrade two times in between, once with a 4770k and once with a 4790k.
My chip is set to run at 4.3GHz, default vcore, and none of the newer chips were considerably faster (not even with the overclocks I got out of them right away). So I kept it.
Now, with newer games like BF1 or racing games I think I've seen enough evidence to get something with more cores finally.
I certainly wouldn't consider an upgrade if my board hadn't shown signs of serious issues again.
This way, I could get PCIe 3.0 and two more cores. I'd always get something with HT again.

 

My own personal view on this is that it is also somewhat dependent upon your motherboard and what features it supports. My main reason for going from the X58 wasn't all about or even mostly about my 980x performing bad. It was everything else that was falling behind. Memory speed, SATA speed/lack of native ports, USB, PCIe, broken sleep power states, no UEFI. Now I realize that isn't exactly comparable in degree, but in context. This new systems is zippy smooth....it's soon enough it still has than new smell...:nerd:

 

Stick with my 2500K @ 4.5 with 2133 DDR3, Need upgrade GPU to keep it for few years till I get major upgrade to 8 core CPU.:banana: