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

Great review , very nice processor !
but I think it s time to change : I ve just changed my 3770k@4.5Ghz for 8700k@4.7Ghz (on all core)
I had too many stuttering on BF1 , Battlefront 2 , Pubg or Assassin credd origin.
Now no more stuttering , games are perfectly smooth (1440p)
And I think , we ll have more and more new games that demands very good processor (Far Cry 5 etc...)

 

Stock clocks and DDR3 1333? Wish you had at least thrown a 4.5ghz+ with some faster ram in the mix.

 

Not sure about pci-e lane improvements, my last 6 cpu`s(2500k,4790k,g4560,6600k,6700k and 7700k) have all been limited to 16 lanes whereas my 4820k i had 40 on the cpu to play with and i didnt have the option for m.2 pci-e x4 back then.

 

I really really liked this article. Thank you!
Additionally, I think someone needs complain about how crappy the 6600k is in comparison. I'll do it: it's just a shameful. I'm glad Ryzen forced intel to up their game a notch.

Thanks HH!

 

Still a better CPU than mine, which is a perfect example of how Intel didn't bother to do anything during all those years when AMD couldn't put up a fight. Three whole generations between that CPU and mine, yet the old basic i7k still beats the much newer i5k. But I'm glad Intel made hundreds of billions of profit in the meantime. Not a single cent of it was used for the benefit of the customers.

I'm so glad AMD was finally able to make a comeback. It was such a sick market.

 

Here you can see what my 2600K does at 4.7ghz and with 16gb 2133mhz RAM in Aida64:



Would have been fun to see you do the entire benchmarksuite at these settings

 

Did you just volunteer to help HH with your board and those benches?

 

Then he would have to spend a few hours uploading benches and games I do not have, easier to send him the motherboard/CPU/RAM mounted and ready to go at 4.7ghz/2133mhz, only thing I would need in return was a Ryzen 1800x setup or something in that ballpark

Anyhow, every site like Guru3D should have a setup like mine ready to go with these settings on the shelf, since so many with SB 2500k/2600K would benefit greatly to se exactly where their old OC'ed CPU/RAM stands vs. current setups.. I suspect most SB user would smile and nod their heads on how good value for money their investment truly was..

 

Great article, was a pleasant read. But I swear, the " Time to upgrade? " question comes round in full force with each hardware release. And usually the answers to those questions were always as valid as they were predicable; Stick with what you have and be content or get an upgrade if you need it and can afford it.

At least with the Ryzen and Coffee lake releases, people started to feel a leap in improvement. Just kinda happy the years of Ivy bridge/Haswell/Skylake / quad-core upgrade discussions have started to dull out.

 

Still running my 2600K with no need to replace. Heck haven't even OC'd this chip yet as I've had no reason so far to do so. My bottle neck in this system is my HDD and GPU

 

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.

 

Sandy Bridge master race.

 

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...

 

Well, 167cb in singlethread in cinebech would atleast put my 2600k@4.7ghz way up in the charts, the 2133mhz ram increases gaming performance significantly, as 2600K is bottlenecked severely by standard DDR3 speeds.

 

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

 

I'll talk for my 2500K, it is dead from performance perspective. Some games show it too. And I do not have Spectre/Meltdown patches yet.
I have seen some results of those patches online for Sandy. SSD IOps go down by around 30%. Compute by 2~10%.

BF1 is most painful. For games I turn off any other application I do not need. My system is no longer Gaming capable PC. It is productivity capable Console.
Seeing 2200G/2400G dancing around 2600K, they would make my 2500K produce magic smoke in attempt to match them. And MS's Spectre patches are behind corner.

 

Killer review as always.....!

I think I'll wait out my 3930K @ 4.7Ghz and 32Gb of quad channel DDR3 RAM @ 2400mhz! Throughput at these speeds are on par with quad DDR4 with its lame timings/latency of today.

Not to mention the prices.......that's enough for most to stay away from an upgrade.