Is This Even Fair? Budget Ivy Bridge Takes On Core 2 Duo And Quad

[killerchickens]

I would love to see how a i7 920 compares.

 

[povu]

As someone who is using a non overclocked E8500 and will be upgrading to the haswell equivalent of the 3570 soon, this makes me very happy indeed.

 

[Cryio]

Brilliant article. I have had these questions for years ! Really, the most perfect, 100% article. These were the exact comparisons I was looking for. The 8400 vs 9550 vs 3220 and 3570. Thank you so very much for this !

I have one more question though, if anyone would kindly answer. How much faster is a Intel QX 9775 than a Q9550 (current CPU) ? The Q9550 is my current CPU and I was wondering if it would be a worthy upgrade to my current motherboard.

 

[povu]

As someone who's still using a non overclocked E8500 and is going to upgrade to the Haswell equivalent of the 3570K soon, these benchmarks make me very happy indeed.

 

[laststop311]

For 200 dollars you can't beat the value of the k series i5 unlocked quads. If you are going to spend 65 on a dual core part you really need to extend your computer budget an extra 140 and get an i5 quad unlocked chip. The extra performance you get is well worth the 140 dollars. Hard to recommend the i7 k series for an extra 110-120 over the i5. The performance difference is not very big all it really adds is hyperthreading 120 for HT is not worth it. I am still sporting the i7-980x clocked at 4.4ghz on water cooling 32nm hexcore. This chip has had incredible longevity 6 cores/ 12 threads at a constant 4.4ghz no turbo. 32nm gulftown has gone strong as hell for me for 3 years already and it still shows no signs of becoming too slow. I have only had to upgrade my ssd (currently 512GB crucial m4 but want to get the 960GB m500 and ebay the m4) add an extra 3TB drive (WD black 7200 rpm) had 2x 3TB WD black before the 3TB addition)(might try them in RAID 5 soon) and upgrade the GPU and my pc has stayed at the top of the pack for 3 years straight. Currently running 2x radeon 7970 ghz edition in crossfire only because i bitcoin mine (or i'd have a geforce) clocks on the radeons are 1270mhz core/1700mhz memory.

Back in the early 2000's 3 years was an eternity for computers. I am very happy I won't have to buy another pc for at least 3 more years probably more like 5. PC lasting 5-8 years near the top of the pack with only minor upgrades. Never used to be able to do that. That is 1 nice thing about cpu performance barely increasing once you hit the 32nm core i series cpu's. Don't have to buy new cpu's and mobos constantly.

 

[g-unit1111]

My old T6600 still keeps up well with modern systems. I'm not getting rid of mine any time soon.

 

[Diabowx]

Quite interesting

 

[upgrade_1977]

I wish there was more testing, as I run a 3 monitor setup, and it's apparent to me that the more you crank up the res and the settings, the lower the difference is. I wonder if it would be worth it to upgrade my i7 920, would I see a big difference, or would it only be 2 or 3 fps?

 

[internetlad]

first relevant Tom's article (AKA one not from a partner site about cars or hats, or how much money apple is making this quarter) in a long ass time. Hopefully we get more like this in the future because I can only stomach so many TomsGuide and Toms IT Pro cartoon articles before I get fed up.

 

[PudgyChicken]

Back in the day I couldn't afford a C2Q or C2D and a mobo upgrade and all, so I was rocking my P4 (HT) for years. Two or three years ago I made a new rig, now I'm rocking the i7 980X. It should have a bit more staying power than the P4 I'm not planning on upgrading this thing any time soon...

 

[InvalidError]

[citation][nom]warmon6[/nom]This isn't always the case. Going from Pentium 3 to Pentium 4 many year's ago for example, (IMO) went south in that department (at least when P4's were first launched).[/citation]
Northwood was the pinnacle of Netburst perf/watt in large part thanks to Hyperthreading adding an almost free ~30% boost but was still nowhere near the P3.

Things became much worse with Prescott which added several pipeline stages at a considerable power cost yet still failed to deliver significantly faster clocks.

On the plus side, Intel still learned a lot from their Netburst failure and some of Netburst's key distinctive/novelty features like the Trace Cache did get reused in the Core architecture.

 

[Diabowx]

Found some interesting things/facts in this review , These are follows :

1.Core 2 duo and core 2 quad doesn't have L3 cache where as core i series , celeron and pentium does have L3 cache .

2.Core 2 duo and core 2 quad uses DDR2-1066 , 1000 , 1045, 890 Rams , where as core i series , celeron and pentium uses DDR3 1600 and 1333 respectively .

3.Core 2 duo and core 2 quad uses DDR2 4 GB Ram clocked at 1066 , 1000 , 1045, 890 where as core i series , celeron and pentium uses 8GB DDR3 Ram clocked at 1333 and 1600 .

Simply i believe (may be i m wrong ) that core 2 duo and core 2 quad will be no matched with these core i and pentium series because of the Rams they were using , As we have already seen in other posts about how Ram timings and frequencies affects gaming and all that apps used in this benchmark .
May be we get equivalent performance when we use exactly same hardware (DDR3 Rams) for these cpus . Remember DDR3s are faster than DDR2 Rams .

I have one doubt regarding the power consumption , power consumption in case of core 2 duo and core 2 quad in cpu load 122.4w and 154.5w and in gaming 264w and 299w respectively , Then how does they consume more power than there thermal limit ?

They should have invented a method to find out how much power cpu(only) using , Not the power consumed at AC source , even converting Ac to Dc wastes some power .

Lastly what i m thinking is (again i may have been wrong) today's game are not optimised for core 2 duo and core 2 quad processors .

 

[buzznut]

I'm amazed the newer Intel CPUs are not much faster.

 

[maurath55]

still rocking a q9550 under water at 3.8, dont have the money to upgrade yet anyways, so this add a little piece of mind

 

[v1zzle]

It would be nice to see some AMD chips in there, just to get an idea.

 

[InvalidError]

Simply i believe (may be i m wrong ) that core 2 duo and core 2 quad will be no matched with these core i and pentium series because of the Rams they were using.

An even bigger factor between Core-2 and Core-iX is that Core-iX has IMC (Integrated Memory Controller) and if I remember correctly, the IMC reduced memory latency by 20-30 CPU cycles vs having to address memory over the FSB and chipset. This is a huge advantage when execution pipelines are stalled waiting for a fetch from cache-miss.

This story pretty much confirms what I have been saying all along: the C2D-E8400 is still a fairly decent chip for most people's everyday uses and is not really worth replacing with anything lower than i3.

While some people here swear by the i5-3570k, this story does show that i3-322x can deliver the goods most of the time too for ~$120 less if you include savings on the motherboard side of things not counting Microcenter specials most of us cannot get.

 

[InvalidError]

I'm amazed the newer Intel CPUs are not much faster.

Not much of a surprise to me. A large chunk of why performance used to increase by ~60%/year was that clock rates and power also increased by 40-50%/year on top of ~15%/year from architectural improvements.

Today, most mainstream CPUs are stuck around 3GHz. Most cost-effective architectural improvements have been tapped and TDP budgets are shrinking due to lack of mainstream software requiring that much processing power so overall improvements naturally slowed down.

A large part of why we are "stuck" at ~3GHz is power-efficiency: going faster requires more pipeline stages, pipeline stages cost power and add latency that can hurt throughput and also increase complexity. Intel has already been there with Netburst, I doubt they are in any hurry to repeat that mistake.

Once applications become more heavily threaded, maybe Intel will bring longer pipelines back and go with quad-threads per core (up from two on i3/i7) to keep execution units busy through individual thread stalls.

 

[smeezekitty]

[citation][nom]ingtar33[/nom]an old core2duo won't work with ddr3 ram[/citation]
I beg to differ. The memory controller was outboard back them so the motherboard dictated the RAM type not the CPU.

I am running a C2D E6700 with 4 GB 1066MHz DDR3 in an Asrock G41M-S3 right now.

 

[hwarda]

This is the kind of article that I like to read.

New tech and stuffs are nice, but performance scaling against older hardware is what excites me, especially when compared to my old 'pumped' cpu. Nice to see how my efforts able to narrow the gap with its later brothers.

All and all what I want to see its just how big is my benefit against price that I need to pay.

 

[gondor]

First I want to thank you for the very interesting article. I'm running C2D E6400 with modest overclock (2.56 GHz) and undervolted (CPU-Z says 1.232V although I'm fairly sure it's set to something lower in BIOS) so there is still some room before it tops out. It is "good enough" for me, with the exception of extremely poorly threaded World of Tanks I don't play games that much so I've been postponing the upgrade year after year now

"We plan to put quad-core Athlon II, Phenom II, and FX processors, stock and overclocked, against this crop of Intel processors soon."

I hope this means modern FX chips (Piledriver-based), so we get better idea how these old Intel chips compare to Trinity. Can't wait to see the part two of this article !

 

[JOSHSKORN]

I'm on the Core 2 Duo E6750. IT isn't even used here. LOL. Considering the 8400 is an upgrade to that, I can easily tell it's just about time. Hell, it's been 6 years.

 

[Onus]

Very interesting. There's a lot here to digest. Diabowx' observations about L3 cache might be quite relevant here; didn't some benchmarks on AMD processors show that L3 made a difference in a lot of games?
It would have been interesting to see a couple of SB chips in there too, perhaps an 860G and an i3-2120.

The declining power use is great though. It also adds a little perspective on why so many people tended to recommend high-wattage PSUs a few years ago, and why they are no longer necessary today. Here's another data point on that: I've got a slightly overclocked HD7970 (1125MHz Core) with an Athlon II 260 mining bitcoins. With a 96%-98% GPU load showing, the UPS is showing ~311W-326W. So yeah, I could run a rig with a HD7970 on a 380W Earthwatts.

 

[the great randini]

it was nice to see an e8400 in a benchmark =). I was always scared to push mine to 4.0 let alone 4.5, I hope to be that good one day.

 

[the great randini]

[[citation][nom]Diabowx[/nom]Found some interesting things/facts in this review , These are follows : 1.Core 2 duo and core 2 quad doesn't have L3 cache where as core i series , celeron and pentium does have L3 cache . 2.Core 2 duo and core 2 quad uses DDR2-1066 , 1000 , 1045, 890 Rams , where as core i series , celeron and pentium uses DDR3 1600 and 1333 respectively .3.Core 2 duo and core 2 quad uses DDR2 4 GB Ram clocked at 1066 , 1000 , 1045, 890 where as core i series , celeron and pentium uses 8GB DDR3 Ram clocked at 1333 and 1600 . Simply i believe (may be i m wrong ) that core 2 duo and core 2 quad will be no matched with these core i and pentium series because of the Rams they were using , As we have already seen in other posts about how Ram timings and frequencies affects gaming and all that apps used in this benchmark .May be we get equivalent performance when we use exactly same hardware (DDR3 Rams) for these cpus . Remember DDR3s are faster than DDR2 Rams . I have one doubt regarding the power consumption , power consumption in case of core 2 duo and core 2 quad in cpu load 122.4w and 154.5w and in gaming 264w and 299w respectively , Then how does they consume more power than there thermal limit ?They should have invented a method to find out how much power cpu(only) using , Not the power consumed at AC source , even converting Ac to Dc wastes some power .Lastly what i m thinking is (again i may have been wrong) today's game are not optimised for core 2 duo and core 2 quad processors .[/citation]

FYI:
if you had a like I did then you could run

 

[Soma42]

Excellent article! This is exactly what I wanted to see!

I'm impressed with how robust the Core2 architecture has been. It's reassuring that my old e6750@3.6 GHz isn't that out of league with modern processors. It still holds up decently in current games, but will be worth upgrading with Haswell or maybe Broadwell to get more cores if nothing else.