Retro review: Core i7 2600K Tested in 2018 - Time to upgrade?

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Hilbert Hagedoorn, Mar 22, 2018.

  1. Brasky

    Brasky Ancient Guru

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

    DeskStar Guest

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    Right on!! This is why I love these kind of reveiws!

    Us.hardware.info has a great writeup of something very similar, but for some reason they didn't OF the memory as high and or the CPU's, so I'd like to see one of these reviews take them to the max!!
     
  3. BlackZero

    BlackZero Guest

    My water cooled 2600K is running a 30% overclock at the Intel-stated default voltage, with many of the motherboard bits under-volted and the fancy overclock settings all turned off. I do of course have 2133 MHz low latency memory to go with it. So can't see an expensive upgrade being a worthy improvement, in all honesty. But that's just my subjective, gaming-oriented opinion, of course.

    I also have a custom OC 290X, which is sufficient for quality 1440p gaming, although it can be a little power hungry at times.

    Easily the two best investments I've ever made.
     
  4. liesenberg

    liesenberg Member

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    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!
     

  5. Loophole35

    Loophole35 Guest

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    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.
     
  6. liesenberg

    liesenberg Member

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    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!
     
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  7. StewieTech

    StewieTech Chuck Norris

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    Great review boss, neat little idea. The 2600k is still pretty capable so its an all around gangsta product alright.
     
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  8. fantaskarsef

    fantaskarsef Ancient Guru

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    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.
     
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  9. airbud7

    airbud7 Guest

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    Great thread Boss! (brilliant) ....Thanks!
     
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  10. Fender178

    Fender178 Ancient Guru

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    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.
     

  11. ubercake

    ubercake Master Guru

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    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.
     
  12. fantaskarsef

    fantaskarsef Ancient Guru

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    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...
     
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  13. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

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    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.
     
  14. Dragondale13

    Dragondale13 Ancient Guru

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    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.
     
    Last edited: Mar 22, 2018
  15. Fox2232

    Fox2232 Guest

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    If you have list of settings you use in tests. Clean install is matter of moments and I have one unused SSD. So I can run test on 2500K through weekend with same settings. (Apparently 1600MHz memories.)
     

  16. squalles

    squalles Maha Guru

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    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
     
  17. craycray

    craycray Member Guru

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    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.
     
  18. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

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    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.
     
  19. Embra

    Embra Ancient Guru

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    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.
     
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  20. Silva

    Silva Ancient Guru

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    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.
     
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