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

I've been running my 2600K at 4.0GHz @ 1.200v for the past 7 years and don't feel the need to upgrade. Temp wise it peaks at 47-50c on air. As far as I can tell, at 4Ghz it's roughly on par with a stock R7 1700X for single threaded performance.

Since I don't do video editing / benchmarking and my applications (games & photo retouching) are either GPU bound, single threaded or poorly optimized for high parallelism, I can't justify wasting 600-700euro for a new CPU/MoBo/RAM/Cooler kit. Plus, I can still max out most games at 1080p 60Hz using my trusty old R9 290.

Who knows, maybe it will last the whole decade.

 

Exactly. I game at 1440p with a 2011 Overclocked 2500K and this review shows that it makes almost no sense for me to upgrade (new motherboard, new CPU, new Ram...).
This just shows that having no competition is bad for consumers. Lets see if AMD can keep being competitive and we start seeing proper gains on the CPUs that will be launched from now on...

 

No worries the board I'm going to send him is an ASUS P8Z68-pro. It had my 2600k running at 4.6 with HT on air and 4.8 with HT on water no problem for 6 years.

 

Just like on laptops - my nearly 6 years old Ivy Bridge 3630QM got improved by 7820HK just by 20 - 30%. Nothing to wax lyrical about progress in about five years.

 

Well, with GTX 670, you really have no reason to fear CPU bottleneck while gaming. But I do see it quite often myself. And my GPU is now far from fastest in the bunch by far.
On other hand I am sure that you must have seen situations where all 4 cores were at 100% used in games too. (I have currently around 180 FF tabs open. If some of multimedia based tabs are active, I usually am 1 and half core shorter. At that point almost any game today gets to be affected negatively.)
Sandy is great chip, but then there is Spectre/Meltdown coming for it one way or another. Today I moved to RS4 Insider Build and am Meltdown Protected.

But it looks like Meltdown patch is not bad:
http://browser.geekbench.com/geekbench3/compare/8581041?baseline=2618832
Right side = No patch; Left Side = Patch
(And yes, newer result has older BIOS, I did downgrade.)

And I just run Atto and disk performance looks unaffected too.

 

Vast majority of users will not notice the performance impact of the Meltdown patch.

 

Great review HH , as usual!!
Could you please OC all three CPU´s and stress them as much as possible and compare temperatures? we all would love to see the difference between soldered and "colgate" CPU´s

 

The Specter / Meltdown Windows patch can be disabled using a simple tool: https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

 

I own an i7-3820, which you can see in one chart from the benchmark. It is almost on par with the 2600k in there, so besides the memory benchmark I would say it performs almost the same, if not some percents better (1 - 10! Not much!).
What is obviously better is the 2011's have more PCIe lanes available than the 115x socket ones. Oh, and they use quad-channel ddr3 instead of dual channel, so in theory the 2011's should perform better there when compared to dual channel at the same timings and speeds. But again this depends on the memory used. DDR3-1066 in quad will be a bit slower than say DDR3-2400 in dual (timings aside). For example quad 1600's give me about 51,2GB/s, while my initially planned setup with R7-1700 with dual channel ddr4-3200 would give me almost the same (in theory and again timings not counted in this calculation!).
My 3820 was OCed to 4,4GHz on all 4 cores, but I did not notice any difference, so I turned this back to 4,0GHz, which is more stable and about 15 degrees celsius cooler than 4,4 under load.

But it is really cool to see a comparision like this. I always asked myself about this, but who in the world (except Hilbert) has dozens of different platforms "laying around" to test? And I bet nobody would be interested in me firing up my old 386/486's and run some ancient version of a benchmark under Windows 3.1 to compare this to his i7 / Ryzen, right? :-D

Nevertheless: Thank you very much Hilbert for this comparision / test.

 

why bother if you're not going to overclock, who keeps its 2600k @ stock?!

 

I would never imagine the 2600k cpu would still be this good . Must be the best prosessor i have ever bought . Interesting to see how much more cpu you get with almost the same power consumption and 4 more cores these days.
Power Consumption when overclocking this cpu will only make it much worse in comperison to the rysen or new intel cpu

 

This is not related to this processor but it is related because I am also using an old processor. How much of an improvement would i see upgrading to a 8600k from an AMD 965BE?

 

With a game like FFXV running better on more than 4 threads makes this CPU and others like it (4c/8T) worth its weight in gold.

It would be a huge upgrade. Better Instructions Per Clock (IPC) and newer architecture. Plus going form 4cores to 6 is a good boost in it of it self.

 

2.5 times higher Single Threaded performance.
3.6 times higher MT (total) CPU performance.

I would consider two alternatives. Ryzen 1700(x) system will cost practically same cash as those few $ you pay extra for CPU will make cheaper MB. That Gives:
2.2 times higher Single Threaded performance.
5.1 times higher MT (total) CPU performance.
Or pay extra (Maybe 10% higher cost once entire system is taken into consideration) for i7-8700K which Gives:
2.8 times higher Single Threaded performance.
5.5 times higher MT (total) CPU performance.

Today even modern 4C/4T CPUs are starting to hit (100% CPU utilization on all cores) wall, 4C/8T are in better spot. If you plan to enjoy your system for half as long as you have current one, I expect you will have it at time when 6C/6T hit same 100% utilization wall. So it is better to sacrifice bit of ST performance to gain higher MT for longevity.

 

I just moved from 2600 to 8600. Until I watercool I won't be seeing the real benefits of the upgrade, but happy I finally took the plunge.

The 2600k is easily the best CPU I've ever owned bar none.

 

Went to 8700K from my old trusty 2500K. I saw difference in performance on some games with naked eye.
2500K and 2600K are legendary products. They still keep performing reasonably well.
What pushed me to upgrade wasn't that my 2500K had "low" performance but the extra cores and threads and that my old motherboard started dying.
2500K will hold a special place in my heart.

 

Where I live r1600 is around 60 euros cheaper than 8600k. r1700 is 120 euros more than r1600, and 8700k is 180 more than r1600. That is why i was wondering between 8600k and r1600. I have this system from 2009 and i think it held up pretty well. I guess i will save up for r1700 to have 8c16t for the future.

 

well heres a nice result on my 2600k before I give her up next month 18 837 on firestrike https://www.3dmark.com/fs/15182297

 

Nice score, but I do think we need to credit your GTX 1080TI for that, rather then your CPU, no?

 

I'm still going to hold out until AMD offers something that can compete "clock for clock" on them speeds. I really prefer higher speeds on all cores over having a ton of cores at lower speeds. Seems to me like that CPU would be better off for longer.

In the case of my 3930K @ 4.7Ghz that likes 2400mhz RAM it is sitting pretty with some hella performance numbers..<a href="https://imgur.com/8R9bhTN"><img src="https://i.imgur.com/8R9bhTN.jpg" title="source: imgur.com" /></a>