but that should only happen if the board is in the store shelf since over 6 months
Happened to my girl's Mobo.
But it was good, they said it was compatible for all i7 processors (didn't specify on haswell refresh) on their store page. So I abused that fact. Got a z97 from a higher price range (and better model) as compensation.
Could have easily updated it, but I saw an opportunity and went for it.
Tho, twas my girl that made me aware of their miss information. I knew when we ordered that we had to do it. She just didn't agree with it
As a SB owner, I can also confirm that the proc is simply getting too long in the tooth now. It simply isn't as capable any more and my astounding amount of personal experience with an equally astounding amount of games confirms that. I'd love to snag a Haswell setup but the price is simply too prohibitive, so for the foreseeable future my only option *at all* would be to stick with SB but to upgrade to an i7 instead to at least make use of multithreading in the games that benefit from it. Crysis 3 was a particularly unpleasant experience where I was completely CPU restricted right from the start.
Had I the choice? £300 in my pocket? No contest, Haswell board + Haswell i7 if I could wing it.
Further confirmation when playing Vermintide, the game struggles to maintain good framerates in combat - often falling down to high 40s, low 50s, with CPU usage pegging 80-99% across all four cores. The game doesn't look anything special. SB procs, at least quads without HT, are simply too old.. even if they are still great.
There aren't that many games where HT makes a lot of difference yet and it's definitely not enough on its own. I don't think an SB i7 is gonna be any good, for example, since in my experience the 4790K with HT off did a lot better than the 2500K at pretty much the same clocks. Meaning it was mainly the CPU architecture that helped.
I guess the reality is that you need both: at least a Haswell generation CPU and preferably an i7 at that.
Gaming is a different story. As we've seen time and time again when benchmarking PC games, the Core i7 is generally overkill as games that utilize the extra threads are relatively rare. The best example we have at hand is Metro: Redux which was 8% faster at 1080p using a Core i7 over a Core i5 with the GeForce GTX 980.
When paired with the GTX 980 (a very fast GPU by all means), the i7-4790 was 1% faster than the i5-4690 at 1680x1050 and no faster at 1080p. When accompanied by the more modest GTX 960, the Core i7-4790 was on par with the Core i5-4690 at 1680x1050 and 1% slower at 1080p.
and a dude on guru3d did his own benches on some other games
One of the recent games that named an i7 as a recommended spec was Witcher 3...
I checked out this analysis:
Note how at around 1:30 mark, when he rides into the city the 4670K starts to lag behind the 4790K. It's apparent from the framerate, but the frametimes on the right also show the i5 struggle quite a bit the longer it goes on.
With a CPU causing such performance issues, it won't feel smooth even with a relatively high framerate.
Note how at around 1:30 mark, when he rides into the city the 4670K starts to lag behind the 4790K. It's apparent from the framerate, but the frametimes on the right also show the i5 struggle quite a bit the longer it goes on.
With a CPU causing such performance issues, it won't feel smooth even with a relatively high framerate.
It's either the patches, or the 4.6ghz overclock on my i5 4670k, but I just downloaded a save file in novigrad, and spent a few min on horseback in the city, frametime was constantly between 16-18ms, even in super crowded areas. i doubt anyone is that sensitive, but you never know
Note how at around 1:30 mark, when he rides into the city the 4670K starts to lag behind the 4790K. It's apparent from the framerate, but the frametimes on the right also show the i5 struggle quite a bit the longer it goes on.
With a CPU causing such performance issues, it won't feel smooth even with a relatively high framerate.
It's either the patches, or the 4.6ghz overclock on my i5 4670k, but I just downloaded a save file in novigrad, and spent a few min on horseback in the city, frametime was constantly between 16-18ms, even in super crowded areas. i doubt anyone is that sensitive, but you never know
For some reason I was always sensitive to such things, and it only got worse when I got a 120Hz monitor
That benchmark also shows the framerate staying above 60FPS even when the CPU starts to bottleneck, so you might just get away with it if that is your cap
Still, the main point is that it looks clear enough that an i7 has the advantage (or it had, at some point) when it comes to CPU intensive tasks in this game. If you pay decent money for a high end GPU you probably wouldn't want it to be held back by your CPU at any point.
In general, it doesn't really help that almost every benchmark I have seen trying to show that difference (or lack of it) goes about it the wrong way. It was quite annoying when I was considering my upgrade choices between 2500K to 3770K or getting a new system with a 4790K. Even knowing the limitations of the 2500K form personal experience, I couldn't find any reliable benchmark that would show them, so I couldn't trust any conclusions made on the higher-end CPUs.
yeah, if you have the budget, it's a no brainer to go for i7, there are games where the differences are notable, and if you are going for above 60 fps, it's pretty much a must to get the best CPU to keep up with the gpu as much as possible.
I really like those digitalfoundry/eurogamer benches. atm, I think they are the best representation of gpu and cpu benches you can get from a third party source atm.
i've even compared some of their vids on my rig, and they were pretty much identical.
What I'd like is to see the same test ran, but this time with an i5-2500k and i7-2600k versus the 4690k and 4790k. I'm sure there's a fairly substantial difference, 10fps easily, and that can mean the difference between barely sustaining 60 (as that video shows) and barely sustaining 50 (as my experience was)
here is a 3 month newer bench with witcher 3 again, this one does include the 2500k. looks like patches made it less cpu bound. but gta V and crysis 3 min fps is still killing the 2500k a bit, not to mention they show a very undemanding scene in crysis 3.
Right across the board there's a clear 15-20fps difference between the 6600k and 2500k.. that's insane But yup, minimum is what matters and that is where the 25 just gets it ass kicked by strangely CPU-heavy scenes. Crysis 3 was a goddamn mess for me whenever foliage was on screen, same with GTAV.. I had to run with "normal" grass in that because the perf drop was terrible.
It's hard to say because this benchmark seems to have the CPUs overclocked, while the previous one didn't (or at least they didn't specifically list them as OC). Performance for the 4690K is only slightly better in some cases compared with the previous benchmark and still behind the 4790K (supposedly at stock clocks). [EDIT: Uhh, got it wrong, it was the GPU that was overclocked, not the CPU].
It is, however, surprising to see Skylake suddenly surging ahead with SB, IB and Haswell performing the same for the most part. The 6600K seems to give performance comparable to the 4790K in the previous benchmark.
Here are benches that are more relevant to the i5 vs i7 debate though:
i7 CPUs are doing a lot better all around. 2500K vs 2700K seems to give a 20 FPS boost here, if you compare the two benchmarks.
Another interesting thing is here:
Looks like with the i7 6700K you hit the GPU bottleneck and overclocking it doesn't make any difference. The 6600K lags behind on stock but catches up with the i7 when overclocked.
Still weird seeing Skylake leaping ahead while leaving the previous gen on the same level pretty much. I recall Haswell being in the same spot before, and now it looks like it's not much better than SB...
EDIT: I suppose I should mention that I mainly based this on W3 performance. In other ones it seems like a 6700K is the only real choice. Dat frame-time consistency... everything else plain sucks in comparison
Last edited by MinderMast on Wed, 7th Oct 2015 20:56; edited 3 times in total
here is a 3 month newer bench with witcher 3 again, this one does include the 2500k. looks like patches made it less cpu bound. but gta V and crysis 3 min fps is still killing the 2500k a bit, not to mention they show a very undemanding scene in crysis 3.
How are thes procs clocked for that comparison? Same clocks?
It was always clear that at every new iteration the intel procs get a few % more performance. So having 10-30% more performance between 2500K and 6600K should be pretty normal.
On the other hand, those old 2500K still perform pretty good, considering you can also easily overclock them to 20-25% of their original clocks.
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
Its funny that you guys now found out that HT is not that bad afterall.
To be fair, it's taken this long to actually get a decent amount of games that utilise it
We can only thank PS4 and Xbone calculator AMD APU "8-core" chips for it, devs need to squeeze everything from the CPU, so engines are getting heavily multithreaded.
Anyone with an i7, can you test this area in witcher 3?
it's a forest area, and i think the ultra shadow settings might be cpu bottlenecked, as I gain 20 fps by lowering ultra shadows to high, but changing resolution with ultra shadows doesn't increase fps at all (it does with other shadow settings)
I mean over 20fps increase on a gtx970 with a notch down in 1 setting. that's insane
Yeah love the part where people were saying HT / i7 doesn't make a difference in games and everyone should just buy the i5. Then surprise!
In 2006 dual core processors were irrelevant, now we use more than 4 cores.
Surprise.
Of course it was known that at some pointe it would become useful to have more than 4 cores. No surprise there. And 4 cores are still more than enough in most cases.
"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment."
Signature/Avatar nuking: none (can be changed in your profile)
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum
