The Intel 6th Gen Skylake Review: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTGenerational Tests on the i7-6700K: Legacy, Office and Web Benchmarks
Moving on to the generational tests, and similar to our last Broadwell review I want to dedicate a few pages to specifically looking at how stock speed processors perform as Intel has released each generation. For this each CPU is left at stock, DRAM set to DDR3-1600 (or DDR4-2133 for Skylake in DDR4 mode) and we run the full line of CPU tests at our disposal.
Legacy
Some users will notice that in our benchmark database Bench, we keep data on the CPUs we’ve tested back over a decade and the benchmarks we were running back then. For a few of these benchmarks, such as Cinebench R10, we do actually run these on the new CPUs as well, although for the sake of brevity and relevance we tend not to put this data in the review. Well here are a few of those numbers too.
Even with the older tests that might not include any new instruction sets, the Skylake CPUs sit on top of the stack.
Office Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totalling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Sunspider 1.0.2
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
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Zoeff - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Thank you for the timely review! :)Whatchagot - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
As a Sandy Bridge owner I've been really looking forward to this. Sadly it's a trailer I've been waiting for and now the show has arrived. Great write up as always.TelstarTOS - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Wonder if i'll make the upgrade or wait for skylake-E next spring (more likely)Despoiler - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I'm waiting to see what AMD's Zen brings to the table next year.darkfalz - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Who knows, maybe they'll catch Nehalem?Refuge - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Hey if they catch up to Sandybridge they will won't be too far off the mark to retake the crown apparently! ROFL....Michael Bay - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
In their dreams. The moment that happens, Intel will trot out something actually new and destroy everything again.lilmoe - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
But you wouldn't want that to happen since you love how much Intel are milking their customers right?I mean, who the hell cares for the benefits that come from competition...... Silly me.
Michael Bay - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
You`re not talking to me but your own projections.cykodrone - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
Agreed, the second AMD goes under, Intel will announce $1000 'consumer' CPUs, enjoy Intel phanboiz. :P