Looks like even a Skylake i3 may be able to retire the venerable 2400/2500K, higher frame rates and better frame times at that. However a native quad does prevent larger dips.
I have a feeling much that is due to the higher base clock on the SkyLake i3 vs. the i5 2500K. Skylake's IPC improvements also help boost performance here too.
The real challenge is if the i3 6320 can best the i5 2500k as the same 3.9 Ghz base clock speed. Sandy Bridge was a good overclocker so hitting those figures shouldn't be difficult at all.
That's true, overclocked the difference would diminish. But you also get modernities like high clocked DDR4 in the switchover.
At any rate, funny that a dual core i3 can now fluidly run just about everything, it's two cores are probably faster than the 8 in the current consoles.
Benchrmarks don't tell you about the hiccups when playing with a dual core. Specially with things like Crysis 3 or even worse ROt Tomb Raider where you get like half the fps just by using a dual core bs a cheapo Athlon 860K.
I had a lot of issues with my Sandy Bridge i3-2125 in Battlefield 3 circa 2011 with lag and poor minimum frame rates.
After long discussions on the forums, it was determined disabling hyper threading actually improved frame rate consistency. So at least in the Sandy Bridge IPC, and probably dating back to Nehalem or even Prescott, Jackson Technology or whatever you want to call it, has a habit of stalling the pipeline if there are too many cache misses to complete the instruction. Obviously more cache resolves this, so the issue isn't as prominent on the i7's, and it would certainly explain why the 4MB i3's are more consistent performers than the 3MB variety.
Of course the only way to prove if hyper threading is causing performance inconsistency is to disable it. It'd be a damn unique investigation for Anandtech to do a IPC improvement impact on it's affect on hyper-threading performance over the years, perhaps even dating back to the P4.
Neah, I went i5-2500k -> i5-6600k and there's no noticeable difference. The best part of the upgrade was those new I/O ports on the new motherboard, but it's a sad day when you upgrade after 4 years and the most you have to show is you new M2 or USB 3.1 ports (and USB 3.1 is only added through a 3rd party chip). Sure, if I bench it, the new i5 is faster, but since the old i5 wasn't exactly slow, I can't say that I see a significant improvement.
Now, if you mean that instead of getting an i5-2500k one can now look at a Skylake i3, I'm not going to argue with you there. Though (money permitting) the boost speed might be nice to have anyway.
Explain to me then, the benefit of having a faster system if the speed boost is imperceptible to the user. You also have no insight into how the original commenter is using their system. Grow up.
>Neah, I went i5-2500k -> i5-6600k and there's no noticeable difference.
In gaming or general applications? If gaming, are you on a 60 Hz display? That could be the biggest bottleneck right there, assuming you have a modern GPU to go with that 6600K.
I have no compelling reason to retire my 2500K still. Running at 4.5GHz 24/7 for years, it is still able to swallow everything I throw at it without issues. The only thing would be the feature set of the new Chipsets (M2 etc...) but .... meh...
Last Xmas I bought my son a 2600K + motherboard for less than ~$200 on Ebay. It may be old, but still runs everything without a hitch, and having 8 threads is great when needed. Intel is competeing against itself, including what you can get used nowadays.
You'd be surprised how many servers actually ship with i3's...those HP ML10's are incredibly common and I've seen a number of Lenovo SMB servers run i3's.
The i3 is more than adequate for most small business servers unless they plan to run Hyper-V. Most other CPU intense services are cloud-based now (I personally think a business is crazy to maintain their own exchange server these days when Microsoft offers a $4/month/mailbox turn-key solution)
Basically all servers do now is run the domain and a few basic services like file sharing and routing. SQL, Exchange, even Hyper-V are all inexpensive Azure\Office365 services. It really comes down to who costs more, your IT guy, or Microsoft. Odds are, the IT guy. Unfortunate because I am one.
Low end consumer CPU's. Intel likes the product segmentation between Xeon's and i5/i7. This is also why Intel forced the use of the "c" series chipsets for the Xeon processors. a Xeon E3-1240 v5 is about $30.00 cheaper than an i7 6700, with a higher base frequency, but slightly lower turbo frequency.
Of course, this helps people who are wanting server grade, but only need low end processing power. A Pentium or an i3 would be a great home server chip, but i5 or i7 overkill. If you are wanting to use a higher-end production computer with ECC, you probably are looking at higher-end processors than i5 or i7 anyway.
However, AMD includes the support in all their AM3+ processors, and I believe in all their FM2 processors as well. Not every motherboard supports it.
jardows2 covers that in his/her product segmentation reference.
If you want ECC on the low end, Intel is happy to sell you an i3. If your needs are any higher, Intel wants to push you towards a Xeon (and C-series chipset), which IIRC are higher-margin parts than the i5 and i7, and happen to have gone through additional server-related validation.
I understand this concept but I still don't get why there are cheap ECC enabled i3s instead of more expensive (but still cheaper than 4C Xeons) dual-core Xeons...
Yeah, that is kinda weird, you would think Intel would do that, and create even more segmentation, which is something they definitely tend to like to do.
My guess would be (and full disclosure... this an educated guess): at some point the market becomes too niche and the higher profit margins get lost to the additional costs of segmenting product lines, keeping different lines in stock, etc. The cheapest Xeon quad core on Newegg is already only $90 more than the cheapest i3. How much more could Intel actually charge for a dual core Xeon over the i3, the only benefit of which is ECC? Then they'd have to maintain a whole new product line, manage stock levels, etc. My guess is that for the relatively small number of customers pairing a dual core with ECC memory, it's just more trouble than it's worth.
What exactly is the point of the Core i3-6098P supposed to be? Compared to the equally priced I3-6100, it's slower, has a weaker GPU, and a higher TDP. On paper I can't see any reason to buy the former instead of the latter?
My guess would be that such models are core i3s with defective iGPUs, and overall lower binned, mostly destined to OEMs that could negotiate a lower price for almost identical performance (3% less frequency = no noticeable difference), in models with typically low-end dGPUs. While at the same time not price dumping the other i3s in the retail market (prices are always much more variable than the MSRP in the retail market and I would guess you could find them for slightly cheaper).
Once again, 3% frequency and 3W TDP don't make for much of a difference.
Yeah it definitely looks like a binning dumpster - trying to salvage the last bit of value from chips with working HT but a damaged GPU that needed partially fused off. If the list price was marginally lower I wouldn't've thought anything of it, although I suppose Intel could be willing to offer better volume discounts behind the scenes.
Yup, the 6098P has GT1 graphics, with only 12 EU's, vs GT2 and 24 EU's in all of the other i3's. I bet they are harvesting chips with bad EU's. As far as price goes, I am sure that whatever OEM is buying those is paying less than the prices on ARK. Intel is kinda famous for having tons of CPU's all the same price, but the OEM's buying them are going ot be paying totally different prices than whats on the price sheets/ARK. I would imagine the prices that they negotiate end up being lower for the lower models and higher for the higher models even if they are all listed the same on ARK.
I did a quick check and did not find any 6098's for sale on New Egg or Amazon. But I could see a position for them if the street price is less than a 6100. For anyone who is not going to use the integrated graphics anyway, saving a few more bucks on the CPU could be worthwhile. Has to be cheaper than a 6100 though because otherwise you would just get the 6100.
Since I'm not finding any for sale, I'm also wondering if they will mainly be sold to OEM's and end up with people who wouldn't know the difference anyway in their low end Dell or HP desktop?
Nice selective test :-). In comparision with rather old i3-4330 (3,5GHz) Skylake shines. But maybe you can add to the charts fastest i3 Haswell (i3-4370, 3,8 GHz). It's exactly in the middle of the tested three cpu's. But then i supose that Skylake "advantage" will drop to mere 2-5%.
As a file compression utility, 7zip is better than WinRar. Where Winrar stands out is as one of the very few real world applications whose performance is hugely dependent on memory speed; which makes it a great benchmark.
I love WinRAR, but even a blind test will demonstrate 7zip to be faster, especially at compression. Decompression is often storage limited unless you have a good RAID or PCIe SSD.
I bought a core i3 6300 for my parents but only paid the price of a i3 6100 around 109 euro, the price gap is so big for such a small performance increase some vendors decided just to dump them out of their inventory.
The i3's should have been removed from the desktop line up a long time ago. Quad cores come out over 10 years ago and Intel is still trying to sale dual cores for the desktop. Its really a testament to how tight a hold Intel's monopoly is on the PC business. Currently the hold that is killing the PC business.
The persistence of dual core hardware says more about the failure of most software to benefit from larger numbers of cores. Unless you've got at least 3 big threads running in parallel the extra physical cores of the i5/7 only serve to drive up manufacturing costs and power consumption.
But, for all those that are just web surfing, reading email, and typing Word documents, how much parallelism do they need? A while back I refurbished a couple of Core 2 duo laptops from about 2009. Upgraded them from 2GB to 4BB of cheap ram and slapped an el-cheapo SSD in place of the old 5400 RPM disk drives and they felt like new machines. For the people doing the sorts of tasks I mentioned above, they are more than good enough - even an i3 is overkill for the task.
Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of IT guys assume that because they run quad cores at 100% all day long with 32GB of ram that Helen on the front desk or Mike in Sales needs the same. They don't. Similar to Ratman I sell a lot of recon Dell and HP ex corporate machines to my small business customers. 2010 spec machines with dual core 3GHz Pentiums with 4-8GB of ram. They can buy three of them for the cost of a 2016 model. They love them. If they need a real boost, a 120GB SSD gets slapped in. They pee their pants with excitement when that happens. Standard business computing was finally catered for many many years ago. It hasn't really changed.
Decrepit Core 2 Duos are indeed perfectly acceptable for poking around on the internet and handling basic office workloads. I'm fairly happy using a T2310-based laptop (C2D@1.46GHz) with 2GB of RAM and a recently purchased 500GB 5400 RPM drive for most of my day-to-day computing tasks. I can feel the system's performance catching up when I ask the Intel x3100 graphics card to chug through anything higher than 720p video on Youtube. Most of my gaming is streamed through Steam so the box on the user end isn't as important as the computer that actually runs the game with reduces my concern pretty significantly when it comes to keeping my laptop up-to-date. I'm pretty sure I can squeeze another year or two out of it before handing it over to the electronics recycling center.
Like jabber says, office work has long since been addressed by technological advancements and _most_ home computing needs aside from throwing around modern games have too.
We have some C2Ds at work, and yeah for a regular office job they are fine IF they have 8gb of RAM, unfortunately these machines are so old keeping them running or upgrading is a hassle. And at least here, unless you are in IT or a programmer good luck getting a SSD. A newer i3 with 8gb and SSD is definitely enough for any casual user at work or home for sure.
It depends a lot on the workload. 2GB is sufficient for almost everything I do on a home computer except for the occasional game. In an office setting 4-8GB would be better just because workforce users tend to leave a larger number of programs open at once. I do agree that in a workplace, computers should still be replaced every 3-5 years due to upgrade and maintenance issues that crop up as they age past that point even if the system performance is still perfectly adequate.
Do tell how to spread a select query (with a join or two) on multiple equally tasked threads when you only need to query a huge table (with the others being relatively tiny). i3s are my go-to recommendation for clients needing POS stations and others that only need a client/terminal for an ERP database.
Thats not how it works. This is like arguing against dual cores because there was no threaded software. Chicken and the egg is a fun game but the process has to come first.
There's no chicken and egg here. We've had 8 thread capable CPUs for years. But we simply don't need them at home or for typical desktop usage. They're great for 3D rendering, video editing or programming, but they're not for everyone.
Dual cores aren't for everyone so lets just agree they should moved to a tablet or watch. Intel needs to move on 6 core Kaby Lake for the main steam at the very least.
No, we don't agree on that. Dual core is plenty for typical web browsing and occasionally writing a paper for school. I'm on an i5 for years and I rarely see all 4 cores put to use at the same time. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I don't agree with it.
I don't understand your point. Did you note how many of the tests where the i3's (sometimes just the 6320 and sometimes all of them) beat the i5? Also look at certain gaming tests where an i3 with a better graphics card beats an i5 with a lesser graphics card...i.e. if you save $100 on the CPU and put that towords the graphics instead, you sometimes come out ahead overall.
Finally, I know plenty of people who are just using their PC for web surfing, email, MS Office, etc where they would not notice any difference between an i3-6100 and an i5-6600K other than the fact that it cost almost $100 more. Sometimes good enough is good enough and thats where the i3 comes in.
Yeah, the i3's sometimes beat the i5's because when moving from the top end i3 to the bottom end i5 you lose quite a bit of frequency, but you gain two physical cores. So, if something is very lightly threaded then it may perform better on the i3.
I agree. If Android can manage to leverage many small ARM cores for common tasks like web browsing, there is no excuse for Microsoft not being able to manage the same feat on Windows.
Please, do more lower-end CPU reviews! This data helps me understand how software and hardware play together more and more.
To those thinking that it's sad that performance hasn't really increased in the past few years, maybe this is more of a sign that games are becoming efficient. If anything, this means your hardware will go a lot longer than before. Think about it, if the i5-2500K is still a viable CPU, think about how long an i5-6600K will last.
I'd love to see the same comparison for the mobile variants of the i3/i5 chips, in particular the 15W variants suitable for ultrabooks and MacBook Pros. Looks like for desktops, as a mainstream user there is no need to look beyond the i3. How about mobile? Looking at Intel's ARK database, there aren't that many 15w i3s (one, actually, 6100U), but a few i5s (four).
That seems tough - since they're soldering into the chassis, and different cooling can result in throttling and very different performance numbers even from the same chips. It'd be really hard to make a fair CPU-to-CPU comparison.
Hm, you're right probably. Seeing how small the differences between the desktop i3s and i5 is, I'm wondering if it makes any sense at all to judge a laptop or ultrabook by its CPU, in particular taking into account your point, i.e. that probably cooling (and selecting a higher or lower TDP by the manufacturer) makes much more of a difference than the CPU model.
Well, in the mobile chips the segmentation is different. In the desktop world going from i3 to i5 you gain two cores, lose hyper threading, and gain turbo boost.
In the mobile chips everything has hyper threading. Going from i3 to i5 gains you turbo boost on a mobile chip and that can be pretty significant, because on those really low TDP chips they tend to have a pretty low base speed but the ones that can boost can usually boost up quite a bit. Going to an i7 in the 15w chips add's a bit more clockspeed and you will typically move from 3MB of L3 to 4MB of L3. The best value are the i5's in the mobile world because turbo boost helps a lot, but moving to an i7 with 4MB of L3 doesnt really gain that much performance, and can be pretty costly.
So, you can't really use these results to judge the differences between mobile i3's and i5's because they are quite different.
I'm waiting for AMD's Zen CPU's before I upgrade my CPU. I'm running an older I5 3330, but so far nothing is really significantly faster for the same price I bought it at the time(180 euros). Especially in games the difference seems negligible and mostly comes down to GPU.
I remember in Eurogamer's i3-6100 review, just using 2666 or 3200MHz DDR4 gave a significant performance boost in pretty much all games, especially Ryse whose maximum FPS almost doubled from 59 to over 100FPS. And this was at the stock CPU clockspeed. Minimum frames improved substantially too.
Fantastic article Ian, you are definitely doing a great job of filling in the "lull" period between major GPU reviews. I have been wanting exactly this review to be done, as I would love to be able to build my kid a cheap computer for school that could do a bit of light gaming. I was really hoping the APUs would give adequate performance, but it looks like I will be waiting for Zen. I really don't want to get a dGPU for his computer and with Intel it doesn't look like there is much of a choice. Zen it is! Please don't disappoint us AMD!
I'm keenly interested in seeing what Zen brings to the table too. However my next desktop PC upgrade is going to be a GPU of some sort and even that's probably a good 6+ months away if not more. Zen will be another CPU+Mobo+RAM swap and I'm not looking forward to anything of the sort right now...unless Zen can more than double the performance of my 860K, at which point I'll be very interested.
Bought a brand new laptop today with an Intel Core i5-6200U Skylake onboard (which you have failed to include in your table) clocked at 2.3 GHz which turbos to 2.8 GHz.
The thing I wanna say if you try to install Windows 7 on a Skylake machine without making a little in-depth research, you're screwed.
One way to install Windows 7 on Skylake machines is described by the following ASROCK article:
I am not ashamed to say I spent the better part of day fighting off the dreaded "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing" before I had my Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit slipstreamed and updated by ASROCK's app.
Perhaps you should consider adding a couple of words on the subject as there are many ppl who will stay on Windows 7 for several years to come and are not very familiar with the Skylake platform.
Well, of course it's not on the table - that's a mobile chip. Plus unless you have some specific business need to use Windows 7 I don't see why you would go through the hassle of putting it on there. It's an almost 7 year old OS.
LOL "failed to include" I love it. "I bought it so you should review it, even if it's not even in the same segment as the other products you are reviewing". Classic snowflake narcissism.
1. I wish you'd calculated price/performance and power/performance for us, rather than leaving us to guesstimate
2. The game benchmarks need 95th (or whatever) percentile frame rates and minimum frame times, as that's where the performance difference between i3 and i5 truly lies.
Ian mentioned in the article that they're still using their 2015 game benchmark suite for this review. I would expect AT's 2016 benchmark list, once finalized, will include more DX12 titles. I'm not sure when those benchmarks are normally confirmed since I've never really given it much thought, but as we're wading into August, one would hope that the 2016 list will be as forward-looking as possible. However, they'll probably need to keep something from the 2015 list in order to have a comparative basis for new and old products. It's also important to retain a DX11 title or two as the older version of the API is very much alive and well at the moment.
I think if your running an oced Sandy-Bridge (2500K) and you use your pc for gaming, its not worth the upgrade cost. Perhaps its worth to upgrade for the very high-end games with maxed out resolution and graphics features, but then id not pick an i3 (-> i7 instead).
If you run simulations or any kind of HPC, you most likely have another setup anyways.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNjT5R5XI4 You can get quite a few frames more with a modern, equally overclocked CPU. If you have the budget or get a good deal, an i7-3770k seems to be a good upgrade without having to get a completely new system with motherboard and RAM. Can be the difference between 45fps and 60fps.
A bit perplexed at the choice of GPUs and CPUs and game titles tested in this review.
The Core i5-2500K is a natural point of comparison since so many people are still on it. Though they are unlikely to switch to an i3 Skylake, still a useful comparison for a data point.
Those GPUs are really old. Someone building a new Skylake system would most likely be getting a 480 or 1060. Also, it would be useful to know if the i3 is bottlenecking games from reaching high framerates on 120/144 Hz monitors.
Which brings us to the choice of games. Following (in my opinion, somewhat dubious) claims by various youtube reviewers that even a skylake i5 is not sufficient for 144 Hz gaming, I'd like to know if an i3 is a bottleneck on games where framerates matter: Overwatch, DOOM, Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, etc. As well as games that stress the number of CPU cores like AOTS, TW:WH, etc.
Hello guys ! I currently own a 860k OC at 4.2 Ghz paired with a Sapphire R7 370 2gb . After consulting this review I understand that the i3-6100 paired with the same R7 370 will perform better in gaming ? Correct me if I am wrong !
Note : Currently I think, the 860k bottlenecks my R7 370 in Tom Clancy The Division. I am sayng this becasue the readings from MSI Afterburner show the following stats at medium settings, 1920x1080 resolution, V-Sync off :
GPU Usage 65 - 70 % with 1800 VRAM usage CPU Usage on all 4 cores : 98 - 100 %
On the other hand in Star Wars Battlefront, on high settings, 1920x1080 resolution, V-Sync off, I've read the following stats :
GPU Usage : 100 % with about 1700 VRAM usage CPU Usage : 65-70 % on all 4 cores.
Recently, I had an opportunity to purchase cheaper new Haswell or Skylake motherboard together with cheaper second hand i3 processor. And I searched and found this article comparing i3-6100 and i3-4330 processors. I also compared both CPUs at PassMark and UserBenchmark results (cpubenchmark.net, userbenchmark.com). The cumulative performance difference there was not greater than 15%. The 15% number seems also compatible with CPU architecture improvement and slightly higher clock speeds. That's why I was very surprised to see much higher performance difference in this article for almost all real world tests (Dolphin Benchmark, 3D Particle Movement v2, Mozilla Kraken and Google Octane v2). Personally, I could not find any logical reasons explaining those elevated performance numbers of Skylake i3 CPUs. Can anybody explain me why we see such big (greater than 30%) real world performance differences in all of those tests?
Those higher than 15% performance numbers are also observable in 2 other test results - HandBrake v0.9.9 2x4K and Hybrid x265. Can anybody find the explanation in any of the architecture improvements from Haswell to Skylake generation of CPUs?
Yet another absurd result is of Pentium G3420, which wins over i3 4330 on Dolphin benchmark by more than 15%. It looks absurd that 2 thread, 3.2GHz, 3 MB cache Haswell processor achieves 15% better result over 4 thread, 3.5GHz, 4 MB cache Haswell processor. Such results make me feel suspicious of all other test results on the charts, sorry.
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94 Comments
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tipoo - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Looks like even a Skylake i3 may be able to retire the venerable 2400/2500K, higher frame rates and better frame times at that. However a native quad does prevent larger dips.Kevin G - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I have a feeling much that is due to the higher base clock on the SkyLake i3 vs. the i5 2500K. Skylake's IPC improvements also help boost performance here too.The real challenge is if the i3 6320 can best the i5 2500k as the same 3.9 Ghz base clock speed. Sandy Bridge was a good overclocker so hitting those figures shouldn't be difficult at all.
tipoo - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
That's true, overclocked the difference would diminish. But you also get modernities like high clocked DDR4 in the switchover.At any rate, funny that a dual core i3 can now fluidly run just about everything, it's two cores are probably faster than the 8 in the current consoles.
Lolimaster - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Benchrmarks don't tell you about the hiccups when playing with a dual core. Specially with things like Crysis 3 or even worse ROt Tomb Raider where you get like half the fps just by using a dual core bs a cheapo Athlon 860K.gamerk2 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
That's why Frame Times are also measured, which catches those hitches.Samus - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I had a lot of issues with my Sandy Bridge i3-2125 in Battlefield 3 circa 2011 with lag and poor minimum frame rates.After long discussions on the forums, it was determined disabling hyper threading actually improved frame rate consistency. So at least in the Sandy Bridge IPC, and probably dating back to Nehalem or even Prescott, Jackson Technology or whatever you want to call it, has a habit of stalling the pipeline if there are too many cache misses to complete the instruction. Obviously more cache resolves this, so the issue isn't as prominent on the i7's, and it would certainly explain why the 4MB i3's are more consistent performers than the 3MB variety.
Of course the only way to prove if hyper threading is causing performance inconsistency is to disable it. It'd be a damn unique investigation for Anandtech to do a IPC improvement impact on it's affect on hyper-threading performance over the years, perhaps even dating back to the P4.
AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
HOW ON EARTH DID I MISS THIS?!?!Thank you for introducing me to Intel's tech known as "Jackson!" This is now *SO* on my "To Buy" list!
Thank you Samus! :-D
bug77 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Neah, I went i5-2500k -> i5-6600k and there's no noticeable difference. The best part of the upgrade was those new I/O ports on the new motherboard, but it's a sad day when you upgrade after 4 years and the most you have to show is you new M2 or USB 3.1 ports (and USB 3.1 is only added through a 3rd party chip).Sure, if I bench it, the new i5 is faster, but since the old i5 wasn't exactly slow, I can't say that I see a significant improvement.
Now, if you mean that instead of getting an i5-2500k one can now look at a Skylake i3, I'm not going to argue with you there. Though (money permitting) the boost speed might be nice to have anyway.
Cellar Door - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
This is a poorly educated comment:a) Your perceived speed might be limited by your storage
b) You don't utilize your cpu's multitasking abilities fully(all cores)
Duckeenie - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Why did you continue to post your comment if you believed you were making poorly educated points?fanofanand - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
LOL nice. I believe Cellar Door was stating that bug77's comments were poorly educated. :PStas - Sunday, August 14, 2016 - link
Maybe he's just giving us some examples?bug77 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Based on two assumptions (and nothing more), you know for certain my comment is poorly educated. Nice.Dritman - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Explain to me then, the benefit of having a faster system if the speed boost is imperceptible to the user. You also have no insight into how the original commenter is using their system. Grow up.Voldenuit - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
>Neah, I went i5-2500k -> i5-6600k and there's no noticeable difference.In gaming or general applications? If gaming, are you on a 60 Hz display? That could be the biggest bottleneck right there, assuming you have a modern GPU to go with that 6600K.
VeauX - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I have no compelling reason to retire my 2500K still. Running at 4.5GHz 24/7 for years, it is still able to swallow everything I throw at it without issues. The only thing would be the feature set of the new Chipsets (M2 etc...) but .... meh...kmmatney - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Last Xmas I bought my son a 2600K + motherboard for less than ~$200 on Ebay. It may be old, but still runs everything without a hitch, and having 8 threads is great when needed. Intel is competeing against itself, including what you can get used nowadays.eaglehide - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
The graphs are not clickable on the GTA V page.sheh - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
ECC only in low-end CPUs?!owan - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
ECC is a Xeon feature once you moving up Intel's food chain. If you need 4+ cores and ECC, you need to get a XeonMorawka - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
It's still suprising to see it on a low end CPU. i didnt know the i3's had ECC, now i'm thinking of building a FREENAS box off of one of theseSamus - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
You'd be surprised how many servers actually ship with i3's...those HP ML10's are incredibly common and I've seen a number of Lenovo SMB servers run i3's.The i3 is more than adequate for most small business servers unless they plan to run Hyper-V. Most other CPU intense services are cloud-based now (I personally think a business is crazy to maintain their own exchange server these days when Microsoft offers a $4/month/mailbox turn-key solution)
Basically all servers do now is run the domain and a few basic services like file sharing and routing. SQL, Exchange, even Hyper-V are all inexpensive Azure\Office365 services. It really comes down to who costs more, your IT guy, or Microsoft. Odds are, the IT guy. Unfortunate because I am one.
jardows2 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Low end consumer CPU's. Intel likes the product segmentation between Xeon's and i5/i7. This is also why Intel forced the use of the "c" series chipsets for the Xeon processors. a Xeon E3-1240 v5 is about $30.00 cheaper than an i7 6700, with a higher base frequency, but slightly lower turbo frequency.Of course, this helps people who are wanting server grade, but only need low end processing power. A Pentium or an i3 would be a great home server chip, but i5 or i7 overkill. If you are wanting to use a higher-end production computer with ECC, you probably are looking at higher-end processors than i5 or i7 anyway.
However, AMD includes the support in all their AM3+ processors, and I believe in all their FM2 processors as well. Not every motherboard supports it.
sheh - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Yes, I was referring to non-server CPUs.But why is it on the i3? Not that I mind, but the surprising aspect and the problem is that it's not on i5 and i7.
Black Obsidian - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
jardows2 covers that in his/her product segmentation reference.If you want ECC on the low end, Intel is happy to sell you an i3. If your needs are any higher, Intel wants to push you towards a Xeon (and C-series chipset), which IIRC are higher-margin parts than the i5 and i7, and happen to have gone through additional server-related validation.
satai - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I understand this concept but I still don't get why there are cheap ECC enabled i3s instead of more expensive (but still cheaper than 4C Xeons) dual-core Xeons...extide - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Yeah, that is kinda weird, you would think Intel would do that, and create even more segmentation, which is something they definitely tend to like to do.rhysiam - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
My guess would be (and full disclosure... this an educated guess): at some point the market becomes too niche and the higher profit margins get lost to the additional costs of segmenting product lines, keeping different lines in stock, etc. The cheapest Xeon quad core on Newegg is already only $90 more than the cheapest i3. How much more could Intel actually charge for a dual core Xeon over the i3, the only benefit of which is ECC? Then they'd have to maintain a whole new product line, manage stock levels, etc. My guess is that for the relatively small number of customers pairing a dual core with ECC memory, it's just more trouble than it's worth.satai - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Thet sounds like a believable explanation.DanNeely - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
What exactly is the point of the Core i3-6098P supposed to be? Compared to the equally priced I3-6100, it's slower, has a weaker GPU, and a higher TDP. On paper I can't see any reason to buy the former instead of the latter?nightbringer57 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Hard question.My guess would be that such models are core i3s with defective iGPUs, and overall lower binned, mostly destined to OEMs that could negotiate a lower price for almost identical performance (3% less frequency = no noticeable difference), in models with typically low-end dGPUs. While at the same time not price dumping the other i3s in the retail market (prices are always much more variable than the MSRP in the retail market and I would guess you could find them for slightly cheaper).
Once again, 3% frequency and 3W TDP don't make for much of a difference.
DanNeely - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Yeah it definitely looks like a binning dumpster - trying to salvage the last bit of value from chips with working HT but a damaged GPU that needed partially fused off. If the list price was marginally lower I wouldn't've thought anything of it, although I suppose Intel could be willing to offer better volume discounts behind the scenes.extide - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Yup, the 6098P has GT1 graphics, with only 12 EU's, vs GT2 and 24 EU's in all of the other i3's. I bet they are harvesting chips with bad EU's. As far as price goes, I am sure that whatever OEM is buying those is paying less than the prices on ARK. Intel is kinda famous for having tons of CPU's all the same price, but the OEM's buying them are going ot be paying totally different prices than whats on the price sheets/ARK. I would imagine the prices that they negotiate end up being lower for the lower models and higher for the higher models even if they are all listed the same on ARK.Ratman6161 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I did a quick check and did not find any 6098's for sale on New Egg or Amazon. But I could see a position for them if the street price is less than a 6100. For anyone who is not going to use the integrated graphics anyway, saving a few more bucks on the CPU could be worthwhile. Has to be cheaper than a 6100 though because otherwise you would just get the 6100.Since I'm not finding any for sale, I'm also wondering if they will mainly be sold to OEM's and end up with people who wouldn't know the difference anyway in their low end Dell or HP desktop?
kuntakinte - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Nice selective test :-). In comparision with rather old i3-4330 (3,5GHz) Skylake shines.But maybe you can add to the charts fastest i3 Haswell (i3-4370, 3,8 GHz). It's exactly in the middle of the tested three cpu's. But then i supose that Skylake "advantage" will drop to mere 2-5%.
lefty2 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Actually, I was surprised that the iGPU sees zero improvement since Haswell.ImSpartacus - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
This is an awesome subject that I've fascinated by. Good to see a proper review.AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Interesting that you kept the WinRAR test and let the 7-Zip test go to the "Legacy" section. Why? Did you do a coin toss between the two? :-)stephenbrooks - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Right... a friend actually persuaded me to migrate *from* WinRAR *to* 7-Zip because it offered better compression.DanNeely - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
As a file compression utility, 7zip is better than WinRar. Where Winrar stands out is as one of the very few real world applications whose performance is hugely dependent on memory speed; which makes it a great benchmark.Samus - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
^This.I love WinRAR, but even a blind test will demonstrate 7zip to be faster, especially at compression. Decompression is often storage limited unless you have a good RAID or PCIe SSD.
plopke - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I bought a core i3 6300 for my parents but only paid the price of a i3 6100 around 109 euro, the price gap is so big for such a small performance increase some vendors decided just to dump them out of their inventory.ShieTar - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Nice review. Any chance that the Pentiums and maybe even Celerons will be added to the comparison?Everybody reviews the i5&i7, but it's really hard to get any feel on how fast (or slow) the very cheapest Intel CPUs really are.
fanofanand - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I second this, I see a lot of inexpensive devices running low-end Intel parts and it sure would be nice to see how they stack up.jaydee - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Any attempts at trying Quicksync with the Skylake i3?AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
+1 on the Quicksync please.elbert - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
The i3's should have been removed from the desktop line up a long time ago. Quad cores come out over 10 years ago and Intel is still trying to sale dual cores for the desktop. Its really a testament to how tight a hold Intel's monopoly is on the PC business. Currently the hold that is killing the PC business.DanNeely - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
The persistence of dual core hardware says more about the failure of most software to benefit from larger numbers of cores. Unless you've got at least 3 big threads running in parallel the extra physical cores of the i5/7 only serve to drive up manufacturing costs and power consumption.FunBunny2 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
-- The persistence of dual core hardware says more about the failure of most software to benefit from larger numbers of cores.the number of embarrassingly parallel user space applications continues to be stuck at a couple.
Ratman6161 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
But, for all those that are just web surfing, reading email, and typing Word documents, how much parallelism do they need? A while back I refurbished a couple of Core 2 duo laptops from about 2009. Upgraded them from 2GB to 4BB of cheap ram and slapped an el-cheapo SSD in place of the old 5400 RPM disk drives and they felt like new machines. For the people doing the sorts of tasks I mentioned above, they are more than good enough - even an i3 is overkill for the task.jabber - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of IT guys assume that because they run quad cores at 100% all day long with 32GB of ram that Helen on the front desk or Mike in Sales needs the same. They don't. Similar to Ratman I sell a lot of recon Dell and HP ex corporate machines to my small business customers. 2010 spec machines with dual core 3GHz Pentiums with 4-8GB of ram. They can buy three of them for the cost of a 2016 model. They love them. If they need a real boost, a 120GB SSD gets slapped in. They pee their pants with excitement when that happens. Standard business computing was finally catered for many many years ago. It hasn't really changed.BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Decrepit Core 2 Duos are indeed perfectly acceptable for poking around on the internet and handling basic office workloads. I'm fairly happy using a T2310-based laptop (C2D@1.46GHz) with 2GB of RAM and a recently purchased 500GB 5400 RPM drive for most of my day-to-day computing tasks. I can feel the system's performance catching up when I ask the Intel x3100 graphics card to chug through anything higher than 720p video on Youtube. Most of my gaming is streamed through Steam so the box on the user end isn't as important as the computer that actually runs the game with reduces my concern pretty significantly when it comes to keeping my laptop up-to-date. I'm pretty sure I can squeeze another year or two out of it before handing it over to the electronics recycling center.Like jabber says, office work has long since been addressed by technological advancements and _most_ home computing needs aside from throwing around modern games have too.
Icehawk - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
We have some C2Ds at work, and yeah for a regular office job they are fine IF they have 8gb of RAM, unfortunately these machines are so old keeping them running or upgrading is a hassle. And at least here, unless you are in IT or a programmer good luck getting a SSD. A newer i3 with 8gb and SSD is definitely enough for any casual user at work or home for sure.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
It depends a lot on the workload. 2GB is sufficient for almost everything I do on a home computer except for the occasional game. In an office setting 4-8GB would be better just because workforce users tend to leave a larger number of programs open at once. I do agree that in a workplace, computers should still be replaced every 3-5 years due to upgrade and maintenance issues that crop up as they age past that point even if the system performance is still perfectly adequate.lilmoe - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Do tell how to spread a select query (with a join or two) on multiple equally tasked threads when you only need to query a huge table (with the others being relatively tiny).i3s are my go-to recommendation for clients needing POS stations and others that only need a client/terminal for an ERP database.
lilmoe - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
What's being multithreaded is the UI, almost exclusively. And that's for responsiveness rather than speed, in which 2 cores more than suffice.elbert - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Thats not how it works. This is like arguing against dual cores because there was no threaded software. Chicken and the egg is a fun game but the process has to come first.bug77 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
There's no chicken and egg here. We've had 8 thread capable CPUs for years. But we simply don't need them at home or for typical desktop usage.They're great for 3D rendering, video editing or programming, but they're not for everyone.
elbert - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Dual cores aren't for everyone so lets just agree they should moved to a tablet or watch. Intel needs to move on 6 core Kaby Lake for the main steam at the very least.bug77 - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
No, we don't agree on that. Dual core is plenty for typical web browsing and occasionally writing a paper for school. I'm on an i5 for years and I rarely see all 4 cores put to use at the same time.You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I don't agree with it.
Ratman6161 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I don't understand your point. Did you note how many of the tests where the i3's (sometimes just the 6320 and sometimes all of them) beat the i5? Also look at certain gaming tests where an i3 with a better graphics card beats an i5 with a lesser graphics card...i.e. if you save $100 on the CPU and put that towords the graphics instead, you sometimes come out ahead overall.Finally, I know plenty of people who are just using their PC for web surfing, email, MS Office, etc where they would not notice any difference between an i3-6100 and an i5-6600K other than the fact that it cost almost $100 more. Sometimes good enough is good enough and thats where the i3 comes in.
extide - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Yeah, the i3's sometimes beat the i5's because when moving from the top end i3 to the bottom end i5 you lose quite a bit of frequency, but you gain two physical cores. So, if something is very lightly threaded then it may perform better on the i3.beginner99 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
True but for the mentioned usage you can step down to a Pentium or even Celeron and save even more and not notice much of a difference.BillBear - Sunday, August 14, 2016 - link
I agree. If Android can manage to leverage many small ARM cores for common tasks like web browsing, there is no excuse for Microsoft not being able to manage the same feat on Windows.http://www.anandtech.com/show/9518/the-mobile-cpu-...
xenol - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Please, do more lower-end CPU reviews! This data helps me understand how software and hardware play together more and more.To those thinking that it's sad that performance hasn't really increased in the past few years, maybe this is more of a sign that games are becoming efficient. If anything, this means your hardware will go a lot longer than before. Think about it, if the i5-2500K is still a viable CPU, think about how long an i5-6600K will last.
Philotech - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I'd love to see the same comparison for the mobile variants of the i3/i5 chips, in particular the 15W variants suitable for ultrabooks and MacBook Pros.Looks like for desktops, as a mainstream user there is no need to look beyond the i3. How about mobile? Looking at Intel's ARK database, there aren't that many 15w i3s (one, actually, 6100U), but a few i5s (four).
dave_the_nerd - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
That seems tough - since they're soldering into the chassis, and different cooling can result in throttling and very different performance numbers even from the same chips. It'd be really hard to make a fair CPU-to-CPU comparison.Philotech - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Hm, you're right probably. Seeing how small the differences between the desktop i3s and i5 is, I'm wondering if it makes any sense at all to judge a laptop or ultrabook by its CPU, in particular taking into account your point, i.e. that probably cooling (and selecting a higher or lower TDP by the manufacturer) makes much more of a difference than the CPU model.extide - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Well, in the mobile chips the segmentation is different. In the desktop world going from i3 to i5 you gain two cores, lose hyper threading, and gain turbo boost.In the mobile chips everything has hyper threading. Going from i3 to i5 gains you turbo boost on a mobile chip and that can be pretty significant, because on those really low TDP chips they tend to have a pretty low base speed but the ones that can boost can usually boost up quite a bit. Going to an i7 in the 15w chips add's a bit more clockspeed and you will typically move from 3MB of L3 to 4MB of L3. The best value are the i5's in the mobile world because turbo boost helps a lot, but moving to an i7 with 4MB of L3 doesnt really gain that much performance, and can be pretty costly.
So, you can't really use these results to judge the differences between mobile i3's and i5's because they are quite different.
slickr - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I'm waiting for AMD's Zen CPU's before I upgrade my CPU. I'm running an older I5 3330, but so far nothing is really significantly faster for the same price I bought it at the time(180 euros). Especially in games the difference seems negligible and mostly comes down to GPU.So I'm waiting on Zen as my next likely upgrade.
DonMiguel85 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I remember in Eurogamer's i3-6100 review, just using 2666 or 3200MHz DDR4 gave a significant performance boost in pretty much all games, especially Ryse whose maximum FPS almost doubled from 59 to over 100FPS. And this was at the stock CPU clockspeed. Minimum frames improved substantially too.wintermute000 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Problem is the price premium for 3200Mhz, you're already halfway to the cost of a dGPU like a GTX950 or R460 that will blow the doors off any iGPUwintermute000 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
whoops I guess I was looking at the expensive stuff, realised that not all 3200 is priced that much higherbeginner99 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
exactly. If you go Skylake, buy 3200 mhz RAM. For 16 GB it's only $20-30 more than 2133 mhz RAM and totally worth it.fanofanand - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Fantastic article Ian, you are definitely doing a great job of filling in the "lull" period between major GPU reviews. I have been wanting exactly this review to be done, as I would love to be able to build my kid a cheap computer for school that could do a bit of light gaming. I was really hoping the APUs would give adequate performance, but it looks like I will be waiting for Zen. I really don't want to get a dGPU for his computer and with Intel it doesn't look like there is much of a choice. Zen it is! Please don't disappoint us AMD!BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I'm keenly interested in seeing what Zen brings to the table too. However my next desktop PC upgrade is going to be a GPU of some sort and even that's probably a good 6+ months away if not more. Zen will be another CPU+Mobo+RAM swap and I'm not looking forward to anything of the sort right now...unless Zen can more than double the performance of my 860K, at which point I'll be very interested.Achaios - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Bought a brand new laptop today with an Intel Core i5-6200U Skylake onboard (which you have failed to include in your table) clocked at 2.3 GHz which turbos to 2.8 GHz.The thing I wanna say if you try to install Windows 7 on a Skylake machine without making a little in-depth research, you're screwed.
One way to install Windows 7 on Skylake machines is described by the following ASROCK article:
http://www.asrock.com/microsite/win7install/
(Thank you ASROCK).
I am not ashamed to say I spent the better part of day fighting off the dreaded "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing" before I had my Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit slipstreamed and updated by ASROCK's app.
Perhaps you should consider adding a couple of words on the subject as there are many ppl who will stay on Windows 7 for several years to come and are not very familiar with the Skylake platform.
DonMiguel85 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Well, of course it's not on the table - that's a mobile chip. Plus unless you have some specific business need to use Windows 7 I don't see why you would go through the hassle of putting it on there. It's an almost 7 year old OS.fanofanand - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
LOL "failed to include" I love it. "I bought it so you should review it, even if it's not even in the same segment as the other products you are reviewing". Classic snowflake narcissism.Meteor2 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
1. I wish you'd calculated price/performance and power/performance for us, rather than leaving us to guesstimate2. The game benchmarks need 95th (or whatever) percentile frame rates and minimum frame times, as that's where the performance difference between i3 and i5 truly lies.
junky77 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
No DX12 comparison?Meteor2 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Another good point!BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Ian mentioned in the article that they're still using their 2015 game benchmark suite for this review. I would expect AT's 2016 benchmark list, once finalized, will include more DX12 titles. I'm not sure when those benchmarks are normally confirmed since I've never really given it much thought, but as we're wading into August, one would hope that the 2016 list will be as forward-looking as possible. However, they'll probably need to keep something from the 2015 list in order to have a comparative basis for new and old products. It's also important to retain a DX11 title or two as the older version of the API is very much alive and well at the moment.jeffry - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I think if your running an oced Sandy-Bridge (2500K) and you use your pc for gaming, its not worth the upgrade cost. Perhaps its worth to upgrade for the very high-end games with maxed out resolution and graphics features, but then id not pick an i3 (-> i7 instead).If you run simulations or any kind of HPC, you most likely have another setup anyways.
jeffry - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
95% of all pp are shopping on a budget anyways, so i would spend my bucks on a new GPU instead of CPU, eg AMD Polaris or Nvidia Pascal GPU.Death666Angel - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNjT5R5XI4 You can get quite a few frames more with a modern, equally overclocked CPU. If you have the budget or get a good deal, an i7-3770k seems to be a good upgrade without having to get a completely new system with motherboard and RAM. Can be the difference between 45fps and 60fps.Voldenuit - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review Ian.A bit perplexed at the choice of GPUs and CPUs and game titles tested in this review.
The Core i5-2500K is a natural point of comparison since so many people are still on it. Though they are unlikely to switch to an i3 Skylake, still a useful comparison for a data point.
Those GPUs are really old. Someone building a new Skylake system would most likely be getting a 480 or 1060. Also, it would be useful to know if the i3 is bottlenecking games from reaching high framerates on 120/144 Hz monitors.
Which brings us to the choice of games. Following (in my opinion, somewhat dubious) claims by various youtube reviewers that even a skylake i5 is not sufficient for 144 Hz gaming, I'd like to know if an i3 is a bottleneck on games where framerates matter: Overwatch, DOOM, Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, etc. As well as games that stress the number of CPU cores like AOTS, TW:WH, etc.
Icehawk - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
They run their benches w/o V-sync... so monitor Hz doesn't matter, you can see the maximum frame rates.I agree, some slightly newer GPUs would be good - at least a 470 or something.
leopard_jumps - Monday, August 15, 2016 - link
i3 6100 + RX 470 4GB ($200) will make $550 gaming PCleopard_jumps - Monday, August 15, 2016 - link
PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gfHsXHPrice breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/gfHsXH/by_merchant/
CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor ($110.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock Z170M Pro4S Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($77.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2800 Memory ($40.98 @ Newegg)
GPU Asus Strix RX 470 4GB - $200
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($47.49 @ OutletPC)
Case: Deepcool TESSERACT SW ATX Mid Tower Case ($39.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: EVGA 500W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($43.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $561.42
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-08-15 13:01 EDT-0400
Andr3w - Friday, September 16, 2016 - link
Hello guys ! I currently own a 860k OC at 4.2 Ghz paired with a Sapphire R7 370 2gb . After consulting this review I understand that the i3-6100 paired with the same R7 370 will perform better in gaming ? Correct me if I am wrong !Note : Currently I think, the 860k bottlenecks my R7 370 in Tom Clancy The Division. I am sayng this becasue the readings from MSI Afterburner show the following stats at medium settings, 1920x1080 resolution, V-Sync off :
GPU Usage 65 - 70 % with 1800 VRAM usage
CPU Usage on all 4 cores : 98 - 100 %
On the other hand in Star Wars Battlefront, on high settings, 1920x1080 resolution, V-Sync off, I've read the following stats :
GPU Usage : 100 % with about 1700 VRAM usage
CPU Usage : 65-70 % on all 4 cores.
So will it worth changing to i3-6100 ?
KosOR - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
Recently, I had an opportunity to purchase cheaper new Haswell or Skylake motherboard together with cheaper second hand i3 processor. And I searched and found this article comparing i3-6100 and i3-4330 processors. I also compared both CPUs at PassMark and UserBenchmark results (cpubenchmark.net, userbenchmark.com). The cumulative performance difference there was not greater than 15%. The 15% number seems also compatible with CPU architecture improvement and slightly higher clock speeds. That's why I was very surprised to see much higher performance difference in this article for almost all real world tests (Dolphin Benchmark, 3D Particle Movement v2, Mozilla Kraken and Google Octane v2). Personally, I could not find any logical reasons explaining those elevated performance numbers of Skylake i3 CPUs. Can anybody explain me why we see such big (greater than 30%) real world performance differences in all of those tests?KosOR - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
Those higher than 15% performance numbers are also observable in 2 other test results - HandBrake v0.9.9 2x4K and Hybrid x265. Can anybody find the explanation in any of the architecture improvements from Haswell to Skylake generation of CPUs?KosOR - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
Yet another absurd result is of Pentium G3420, which wins over i3 4330 on Dolphin benchmark by more than 15%. It looks absurd that 2 thread, 3.2GHz, 3 MB cache Haswell processor achieves 15% better result over 4 thread, 3.5GHz, 4 MB cache Haswell processor. Such results make me feel suspicious of all other test results on the charts, sorry.