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

Thanks for the reply there Hilbert. It's good to hear you're still wanting to add those overclock results into the article, I think it would add a lot to that article & make it a lot more relevant for the folks out there with a 2600K, because they mostly will be overclocking them if they still have them for gaming purposes. I'm guessing that if you are able to update the article that you'll post it back up on the front page so people know about it.

 

So that's an 8 year old CPU from the same kind of era and similar to the i7-980x then (I think). It's doing well! It does perform less though, in pubg for instance, so it's not the best choice if you wanna to online multiplayer fps gaming on a high refresh rate monitor, but it still does surprisingly well - and if you don't have a high refresh rate monitor then it's still a perfect gaming CPU, from that video. Not a lot of folks have that CPU though, it's a server CPU, so the 2600K in this guru3d review is more relevant for making comparisons with newer CPUs because a lot of folks still have 2600K's, and the 2600K only has four cores (8 threads) rather than 6 & 12. Amazing to see that old CPU in your linked video pretty much keeping up with the 8700K for the most part.

 

i7 2600k@4.5ghz paired with a Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 64 in firestrike:


Looks a bit different compared with Hilbert's stock run with GTX1080

 

NO, you could have had 6C/12T and 8C/16T from intel even if AMD was not around. They could deliver, but people let themselves to be deceived and were upgrading every 1~2 "generations" to same number of cores/threads.

I did sit on my i5-2500K even while it sucked over last year and something till I went for Ryzen 7 2700X.
(i5-2500K is still OKish if one aims at 60fps and uses fps limiter for frame pacing. But above 80fps it stutters in many modern games even while it can pull 100fps+. So one has to gradually take fps down till frametimes get under control.)

And way intel played entire notebook market was unbelievable too. You could have gaming notebook with i7-720QM (4C/8T) + HD5870 long time ago for under $1000. Then intel took down 4C/8T and i7s became 2C/4T till recently.

 

An update, all my rigs - i7 2600K @4,2ghz, i7 4770K @4.2ghz, i7 3960X @4.1ghz - have been update with better GPUs. I really don't feel a need for any CPU upgrades because they can still dish out good enough framerates for smooth gameplay.

The 2600K has been paired with a GTX1080 on a 4K TV, the 4770K + RTX 2080 Ti on a 3440x1440 monitor, and my fave 3960X + 2x RX VEGA 64 on a 3840x1080 display, all games that I play on these rigs run just fine. I'm lucky I guess as I don't play MMOs or any online game for the matter.

 

Need help:
I'm currently using i7 2600k on ASUS P8Z77M Pro GTX1070 OK, due to PCIe x1 is right below after x16 one this mean I can't put my upcoming PCIe x1 TP-LINK Wi-Fi adapter on the right place because my GTX 1070 uses 2 slots (too big). I watched YouTube video explaining that is possible to put an x1 card to any x16 PCIe. Officially Intel says that 2600k has poorly 16 lanes only.
Now I'm afraid that after buying that adapter and put it on next x16 one they will negotiate which may lead my 1070 work as x8 or something lower.
Just to let you know the next two x16 ones are electrically x8 maybe (I see pinout only the half of it... I carefully verified my Amotherboard).
I'll appreciate your reply.

 

My Sabertooth P67 with i7 2600k goes to PCIe x8 if I use the second PCIe x16 port, tested with several PCIe x1 cards... My Vega 64 with the monster Nitro+ cooler from Sapphire covers 2 PCIe x1 ports, pretty moronic placement of ports... PCIe x8 really throttled performance badly in MPC-HC+MadVR@4K, not trying that again

 

Last month I finally upgraded from an i5 2500K to a Ryzen 3700X. Kept the same GPU (980 Ti) as GPU prices are ridiculous.

It's pretty much what I expected: most games don't benefit that much. Except for some that were memory-bound. Going from DDR3 1600 to DDR4 3600 helps quite a bit there. There's also a bit less "hitching", mean those "1% and 0.1% FPS lows" are better on the Ryzen. But overall, it seems like the OCed 2500K is still holding up in 2021! What a legendary CPU that was. Longest-lived machine I have ever owned since I got into PCs in the mid 90's.

(This is obviously all at 1440p. At 1080p and especially 900p, perf is noticeably better on Ryzen. Also, this is only about gaming. When I build software in Linux with "make -j16", the perf difference of the 8C/16T Ryzen compared to the 4C/4T Sandy Bridge is so much better, it's not even funny )

 

imo the actual experience,that is game fluidity,is gonna change more than framerate numbers.