Upgrading from an Intel Core i7-2600K: Testing Sandy Bridge in 2019
by Ian Cutress on May 10, 2019 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Overclocking
- 7700K
- Coffee Lake
- i7-2600K
- 9700K
Gaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Civilization VI | RTS | Oct 2016 |
DX12 | 1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
8K Ultra |
16K Low |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Civilization is a game that isn't frame rate driven per se, and having all the settings turned up helps a lot. However even at 4K, there's difference in performance between the 2600K and the 7700K when both at stock, which gets halved when the 2600K is overclocked.
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Ironchef3500 - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
Still running one of these...warreo - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
same here, it's still running greatNetmsm - Friday, May 10, 2019 - link
No! It dose not run great, this is 9700k that runs very disappointing.flyingpants265 - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
Hah, I get your point. But as of this moment, 9700k is one of the best desktop CPUs out there.Netmsm - Saturday, May 11, 2019 - link
:)It'd be better to say 9700k is one of the best Intel's desktop blah, blah, blah.
jgraham11 - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
9700k can pump out the most frames per second but it is not the best by any means, its utilization it typically more than %80. Just like a few years ago when all those quad cores were doing so great compared to AMDs more cores and more thread approach. Now those quad cores that put out all those frames are struggling to keep up in modern titles, those AMD processors are still putting out descent frame rates! Another example of AMD's fine wine technology.With that said, is the frames per second really a good metric to determine longevity of a processor?? Or should be looking at CPU utilization as well.
lmcd - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
This article is old but "fine wine" about AMD's old processors is pure delusion. 2600k-age AMD looks horrible. Bulldozer was always horrible, and Piledriver has looked worse with age. Even Excavator gets absolutely smoked by most old Intel CPUs. While obviously not identical and much higher power, an Intel 3960X still went even with nearly every Ryzen 1 CPU. Fine wine my ass.yankeeDDL - Sunday, May 12, 2019 - link
Actually, this is a pretty fair summary. The 9700K, 9 years later, offers about 40% advantage over the 2600 (except in gaming, where more cores don't matter, today), which is quite abysmal.Vayra - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
More cores don't matter? What results have you been looking at for gaming? 4K ultra?yankeeDDL - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
Obviously, I was referring at the article. "More cores" meant going from 4 of the 2600 to 8 of the 9700. And no, they don't matter, unless you see a benefit of running at 300fps instead of 250fps. At high res, when the fps start coming close to 60fps, the 2600 and the 9700k are basically equivalent.A different story would be going from 2 to 4, but this would have nothing to do with the article...
Is it clear now?