The Intel Broadwell-E Review: Core i7-6950X, i7-6900K, i7-6850K and i7-6800K Tested
by Ian Cutress on May 31, 2016 2:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Enterprise
- Prosumer
- X99
- 14nm
- Broadwell-E
- HEDT
Alien: Isolation
If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled.
Total War: Attila
The Total War franchise moves on to Attila, another The Creative Assembly development, and is a stand-alone strategy title set in 395AD where the main story line lets the gamer take control of the leader of the Huns in order to conquer parts of the world. Graphically the game can render hundreds/thousands of units on screen at once, all with their individual actions and can put some of the big cards to task.
For low end graphics, we test at 720p with performance settings, recording the average frame rate. With mid and high range graphics, we test at 1080p with the quality setting. In both circumstances, unlimited video memory is enabled and the in-game scripted benchmark is used.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. For low end systems we test at 720p on the lowest settings, whereas mid and high-end graphics play at 1080p with very high settings across the board. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).
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unityole - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
well time to readDrumsticks - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
I've gotten through about half of it so far (and the conclusion) but man, those prices... Zen is supposed to be really, really close to Broadwell in IPC. Imagine that 8-core Zen part with 90-95% of BDW-E performance at 30% of the price. That would be really pretty nice.Great review so far, and I'm sure the rest is awesome!
SunLord - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
If Zen is 90% the performance of BDW-E then it will be priced to match that though I doubt they'll break $999. AMD will try and under cut Intel but it's not gonna give a away a great performing chip like it had to with the crappy cores it has nowjjj - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
lol 7$ per mm2 for top SKU is beyond outrageous. Anyone buying this deserves a nomination for the Darwin Awards.Zen can compete with Intel's 2 and 4 cores + pointless GPU on price, easily.
Railgun - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Because dying in a stupid way is akin to buying an expensive chip. And since when would price per area be any useful metric?Shadow7037932 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
>Zen can compete with Intel's 2 and 4 cores + pointless GPU on price, easily.That's what you're hoping for. For all we know, there could be some serious issues with Zen. Remember the TLB issue with the original Phenoms?
silverblue - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
...and the AVX memory write performance issues with Piledriver. Still, what architecture doesn't have bugs?Ratman6161 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
I've been wanting to like AMD for a long time. I still remember the good old days of the Athlon 64 and 64 x2 when they used to beat Intel and at a lower price. but they keep on disappointing me. I'm taking an "I'll believe it when I see it approach"Azethoth - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
I think you mean we remember that one time the Athlon 64 beat intel and we bought it but everyone else stuck with Intel because Intel, or AMD is for gamers, or Intel being monopolistic.That is more than 10 years ago though and it seems that by stated policy those days are never coming back for AMD.
usernametaken76 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Eh, I remember prior to Athlon 64, just plain old Athlon XP, the value was tremendous compared to Intel. There was no sense in buying Intel if you were building a gaming rig, something for yourself to do basic computing tasks, etc. Intel was for suckers who bought business class desktops.