"Dragging Sandy Bridge in 2015" article?

[Shneiky]

I remember the article called "Dragging Core2Duo in 2013" so I believe something similar should take place with Sandy.

Sadly enough I did not see any 2700K or 2500K in the new Skylake article. Would be interesting to see how it fares. Did the new I5 finally manage to overtake the old-but-gold 2700K? Is it time to upgrade? Sandy is 5 years old but still flexes some muscles even compared to the new architectures.

Sadly enough you can't calculate the differences yourself, because the test suit changed the past 5 years. Maybe putting a 2700K over the new test suit and compare apples to apples with the new 6700K will answer the question of many - is it time to upgrade? Gamers are more prone to upgrades, but the digital artists do not have the drive to have the latest and greatest, but want something that does the work in nice manageable times. Many are sitting on Sandy based Xeons, so I believe the productivity and workstation pages would be rather interesting.

Hope this get to the eyes of a mod and they consider it with the rest of TH staff.

How many here are still sitting on 2700s and 2500s and want such an article? Raise your hand.

 

[davidarad02]

pcper had an articale comparing game performance between skylake and sandy bridge:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Skylake-vs-Sandy-Bridge-Discrete-GPU-Showdown

 

[gamerk316]

Is there a performance advantage to upgrading? Yes. Is it worth spending $500 on a platform upgrade? Probably not.

That's the issue; people like me have no reason to spend a ton to upgrade our 2600k's.

 

[davidarad02]

Is there a performance advantage to upgrading? Yes. Is it worth spending $500 on a platform upgrade? Probably not.

That's the issue; people like me have no reason to spend a ton to upgrade our 2600k's.

that is probably better off spend on a GTX 980 or a r9 fury

 

[gopher1369]

For me the real question isn't "should I upgrade from a Sandybride processor to a Skylake Processor?" because the performance improvements clearly aren't worth the investment for the vast majority of people. Buf you ask the question "is it worth upgrading from the socket 1155 platform to socket 1151?" then the question becomes far more interesting.

Example: My desktop PC, which has a Sandybridge Pentium G640 processor on a H61 chipset motherboard, has no USB3. No PCIe 3. No RAID. No RST. No SRT. No M.2.

 

[davidarad02]

For me the real question isn't "should I upgrade from a Sandybride processor to a Skylake Processor?" because the performance improvements clearly aren't worth the investment for the vast majority of people. Buf you ask the question "is it worth upgrading from the socket 1155 platform to socket 1151?" then the question becomes far more interesting.

Example: My desktop PC, which has a Sandybridge Pentium G640 processor on a H61 chipset motherboard, has no USB3. No PCIe 3. No RAID. No RST. No SRT. No M.2.

so for you skylake seems very tempting because you have quite an old system, and upgrading to a skylake i5 and a h170 motherboard makes a ton of sence...

 

[guanyu210379]

If you are already on SandyBridge i7 2600k, going even Skylake i7 6700k does not worth the money.
Next time, be a little bit more specific on which processor you have.

G640? This processor is already quite weak on release day. Today? do not even ask.
Even a simple upgrade to Haswell i5 is already a huge improvement.
Now to the Skylake topic, if you are aiming for o extra low Skylake, the upgrade from G640 might not worth it. But, if you aim for Skylake i5 or i7, you will see a big upgrade.

 

[gopher1369]

so for you skylake seems very tempting because you have quite an old system, and upgrading to a skylake i5 and a h170 motherboard makes a ton of sence...

An i5? Nope. This is a desktop used for listing stuff on Ebay and editing photos my wife takes on her smartphone. Give me a Skylake Pentium for £40 with USB 3.0 and I'd be quite happy. Also M.2, I quite like the look of an M.2 SSD, currently I have an older Crucial 128Gb SSD so it might be nice to get something faster and bigger. I don't even think H61 supports SATA3, I think it's running SATA2.

 

[gopher1369]

G640? This processor is already quite weak on release day. Today? do not even ask.
Even a simple upgrade to Haswell i5 is already a huge improvement.

The PC is mainly used for basic web broswing and editing photos to upload to Ebay. How would a Haswell i5 improve that?

 

[guanyu210379]

For your usage e.g. listing stuffs on ebay, light editing, etc. going Skylake does not provide you any real benefits.
Even the older C2D Exxxx can already do that properly.
Getting faster SSD and/or faster SATA will also not really bring much, well....except for the USB3.0 feature.
It would be better to use your rig till the day it died.
Keep your money for something else.

 

[Shneiky]

I guess everybody here missed the point.

The point is not gaming - we already know the 1-2-3 fps advantage.

" Gamers are more prone to upgrades, but the digital artists do not have the drive to have the latest and greatest, but want something that does the work in nice manageable times. Many are sitting on Sandy based Xeons, so I believe the productivity and workstation pages would be rather interesting. "

The new Skylake shows most improvement in decoding. But it would be interesting to see proper 3D rendering/Mental Ray/Vray, Premier Pro, After Effects and etc. benchmarks performed on the latest software and benchmark versions to see an apples to apples comparison. And maybe it can be a Windows 10 / Win 7 comparison if there are stable enough drivers for everything.

Specially interesting will be if the new I5 managed to overtake the Sandy I7s in productivity.

 

[Eggz]

The video below should answer your question. It was a test where all i7 chips from the last four generations were all OCed to 4.4 Ghz for a benchmark in a suite of modern games using a Titan X to relieve graphics bottlenecks.

In complex games, Skylake showed up to a 25% to 30% improvement over Sandy Bridge, and improvements were incremental between those generations. It's also worth keeping in mind that the newer chips might be able to comfortably OC further than the older chips.

Moral of the story: For gaming, CPU and motherboard upgrades can be worth it every few generations, especially if you've already upgraded the rest of your system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sx1kLGVAF0

 

[guanyu210379]

Again,
For selling stuffs on ebay, light editing, browsing, watching movies, you should simply keep your current rig.
No need to upgrade anything, just use it till it is dead.

 

[Tradesman1]

I think I see where you are coming from, and while it's actually a simple question (I think) and the to me the answer is Yes, the 2700 and 2600 is still a very viable option for this type of work. You then need to look at additional questions, since you do in fact have the CPU horsepower for the work you do. Questions I would pose are:

Are you happy with your productivity?
Are your clients/bosses happy with the productivity?

While you would, indeed, make gains by getting a faster, more powerful CPU. The newer CPUs also offer higher productivity gains from the platforms they reside on. With most 26/2700s you are (generally speaking) limited by the other core components of rig in small degrees. Most 26/2700s can handle up to 2133/2400 DRAM and 32GB, where with the 6700K/Z170 platform, Skylake has been shown to run DRAM up to 4000+ and primarily at this point 32GB, 64GB sets are on the way.

Productivity could also be enhanced by the new USB 3.1, e-SATA, M.2 SATA, and more.

Also keep in mind that the SB has reached it's EOL and if problems do arise with components, replacement may not be easy.

As far as actually comparing current vs past, I would guess the editorial area staff may have SB/IB rigs available, but many of the articles/reviews are done by 'associate editors' (at least that's what I was 😉 ), and we are pretty much limited to what we have...I maintain 3 primary rigs, soon to be 4 as I'm going to do a Skylake rig, (waiting on the release of the new line of Trident Z DRAM from Gskill (though I'm I'm getting antsy and may order a set of the Ripjaws 5, while I wait 😉 ), but I sold off my 2500K mid last year and my 3570K rig towards the end of last year due to the decreases of available mobos et al. (Can't build on a platform without parts, and clients want the newest anyway 😉 )

 

[guanyu210379]

I think I see where you are coming from, and while it's actually a simple question (I think) and the to me the answer is Yes, the 2700 and 2600 is still a very viable option for this type of work.

I already told the thread poster that he should simply keep his PC until it is broken and then buy a new one then.
It is still highly useable for his need.
He just does not want to read or hear, what I posted..already twice.

If he wants already a new PC and is simply trying to find an excuse for it.
then..no need to hassle, he should just simply buy a new rig.
It is normal, all of us have such feeling if the PC is old but actually still capable for our needs.

 

[Tradesman1]

Yes as I said, it's still viable, if happy with the productivity one can get out of it. It can be the decision comes down to can productivity be increased by newer hardware (generally yes) but one needs to weight the costs to benefits. Basically all my clients in a similar line of work have upgrades from SB rigs, and the majority have or are in the process of leaving IB also

 

[Shneiky]

I don't want attention. I don't want people to tell me if i need to buy or not to buy a new computer. I never asked people to tell me what should I buy.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6670/dragging-core2duo-into-2013-time-for-an-upgrade

I want an analog of this, just name it "Dragging Sandy Bridge in 2015" and make it pass through TH's extensive benchmark suite.

All in all for purely the pleasure of reading it and for seeing the evolution of architectures. This thread is all about that. About an article. About the fact that I am interested in such an article.

I never, and repeat NEVER, ever asked should I buy a new computer or not. I will not buy a 6700K. Not even planning to, waste of money for me. I am either going for Skylake-E or when the consumer I7s become 6 cored. Thats it.

All those who are spamming about buying or not buying a 6700k - that was never the topic. End of story.

@Tradesman1,

Did not know that you have that many associate editors. Thanks for the info. Could you please lock this thread. Is going nowhere.