Upgrading from 2500k to 10700k for single core performance. Is it worth it?

Yuriy83

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Hey!

I've been using 2500k at 4.5 GHz since 2011. I use it for work and playing Overwatch. I was thinking about upgrading since Overwatch performance got terrible lately. However the software I use for work relies heavily on single core performance. So I'd like to get a noticeable boost in this area as well to justify spending $800 or so. I looked through some benchmark results and in many test (like Cinebench R20 single-core for example) 10700k beats 2500k by about 70% which is great. But in CPU-Z it's just 25-30% faster.

Why does the difference varies so much between the two? Is it really worth upgrading in my case? Thanks.
 
The best for you would be to have the chance to try one to be sure for your work applications, and I am not sure how much is due to more to the faster ram and so on than just the cpu, but going from a bit faster than a 2500k (3500) to slower than a 10700k (Ryzen 2600), made a very nice difference for visual studio/blender.

It is really hard to go about being worth it or not, maybe looking at a 10600-10600k instead of a 10700K could be worth it, you are paying for 2 more core.

Can you google the name of the software you use for work with modern CPU names vs older one to see the experience of other people with them or they are niche affair ?
 
amd-ryzen5600x-5800x-csgo.png

If you want single core performance for work applications or esports games, you should be looking at Zen 3.
 
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going from a bit faster than a 2500k (3500) to slower than a 10700k (Ryzen 2600), made a very nice difference for visual studio/blender

That's nice to hear. Have you noticed any other benefits in day to day usage?

maybe looking at a 10600-10600k instead of a 10700K could be worth it, you are paying for 2 more core

I did consider it, but 10700k has more cache and slightly faster clock speeds and I heard some extra cache could be beneficial for the software I use. Plus 2 more cores make it a bit more future-proof.

Can you google the name of the software you use for work with modern CPU names vs older one to see the experience of other people with them or they are niche affair ?

I tried it, but couldn't find anything specific. I might need to do some more research though.

If you want single core performance for work applications or esports games, you should be looking at Zen 3.

I was seriously considering it, but there are a few things going for Intel:
  • some of the specific software I use tends to favour Intels
  • I can buy Intel tommorow whereas AMD is nowhere to be found and there's no info on when it will be available in my area. Also not a fan of being an early adopter.
  • I'd like to have a backup GPU
 
You will benefit from a CPU upgrade no matter what path you take. You'll get a bump from CPU and RAM. If you go Intel I'd say you'd be more than good with a 9700K ~$200USD, 9900K ~$300USD or 10600K ~$280USD. I just built an average gaming system with a 9600K and a RTX 2060S. AMD has upgrade paths for you as well.
 
So I got my new PC yesterday. A 10700K with 3200 CL16 RAM and a decent motherboard.

I must say the single core performance is pretty disappointing. I got a 15-20% improvement in most cases and a 30% improvement in some cases over the 2500k which is not what I'd hoped for considering 2500k runs at 4.5 GHz and 10700k at ~ 5.1.

So for those who seek fast single core speeds: it might not be worth it, you should probably wait another decade :)
 
Your cpu is getting a bit long in tooth. For some things, sure it's pretty fast, because of the OC. But other things won't even make sense because your CPU simply lacks the instructions... and for those things, the perf hit will be pretty large.

Anyway, it's up to you. Btw, I still run an old i7-2600 on one of my hosts. And it works fine there, but almost anything newer is going to be better in so so so many ways (extra instructions, better iGPU).
 
Your cpu is getting a bit long in tooth. For some things, sure it's pretty fast, because of the OC. But other things won't even make sense because your CPU simply lacks the instructions... and for those things, the perf hit will be pretty large.

I'll keep 10700k anyway so I can sell my 2500k while I still can. I just can't see a huge difference yet, unless I'm playing games, where the difference is HUGE even with the same GPU.
 
No problem, Taco.

Since I bought 2500K in 2011 only 2 things greatly improved overall responsivness: SSD and 144Hz.
 
Interesting I went from a 2600k/ssd/ddr3 to a 9900k/nvme/ddr4 and it was night and day on load times for games especially.
(be it may I was playing at 60hz still on everything but, changing just the core was significant for me with my 1070)
 
So I got my new PC yesterday. A 10700K with 3200 CL16 RAM and a decent motherboard.

I must say the single core performance is pretty disappointing. I got a 15-20% improvement in most cases and a 30% improvement in some cases over the 2500k which is not what I'd hoped for considering 2500k runs at 4.5 GHz and 10700k at ~ 5.1.

So for those who seek fast single core speeds: it might not be worth it, you should probably wait another decade :)
I updated from a 2500k to 6600k after 5 years and felt like it was the same computer. Now 5 years later I'm in the same situation and have decided to wait a bit longer. It sucks that CPU's have almost stagnated. Back in the day every CPU upgrade was huge.
 
Most likely going to make this jump from a 4670 to either a 10600 or 10700 given the new AMDs won't be seen for months and months. Here's to hoping faster RAM and more threads will rock my little world.
 
It could be the nvme drive.
Possibly, but thats only a slight improvement as the latency is about the same as a reg ssd.
I personally think the 2x speed of the ram combined with the extra 1.2ghz on the cpu clock helped more than the nvme (went from ddr3 1600 to ddr4 3200)
 
My buddy upgraded from a 2600k to 8700k, so he's in the ballpark.

The thing that hobbled his gpu upgrades every 3 releases was sticking to the same old monoprice 60hz panel. That got upgraded to high refresh and he started to see hitching thru 1080 and 2080S.

That's what finally prompted him to grab some cheapie parts off Craigslist.
 
I updated from a 2500k to 6600k after 5 years and felt like it was the same computer. Now 5 years later I'm in the same situation and have decided to wait a bit longer. It sucks that CPU's have almost stagnated. Back in the day every CPU upgrade was huge.
I just moved from a 6600k to a 9700k and have the same results. Destiny 2 runs a bit smoother for me but everything else feels the exact same.
 
I updated from a 2500k to 6600k after 5 years and felt like it was the same computer. Now 5 years later I'm in the same situation and have decided to wait a bit longer. It sucks that CPU's have almost stagnated. Back in the day every CPU upgrade was huge.
well, you went from 4c/4t to 4c/4t, which was a dumb upgrade.

You would notice a huge upgrade with 8c/16t for example. along with the IPC improvement in ryzen 5000.
 
well, you went from 4c/4t to 4c/4t, which was a dumb upgrade.

You would notice a huge upgrade with 8c/16t for example. along with the IPC improvement in ryzen 5000.
Despite improvements in IPC and performance per clock, the 6th-Gen i5 wasn't sufficiently better-performing than the 2nd-Gen i5 to justify the cost of a new CPU, a new motherboard and new RAM (combined).

Now, if the 6th-Gen i5 were part of a completely new build (that is, the owner either had a Core 2 or older PC or nothing at all), then yes, it was worth it. And I've done that in the past, wasting my money on upgrading a slightly-older-gen 4-core/8-thread i7 for another until this past December when I made the leap to an 8-core/16-thread CPU-based PC.

Now, the original question was upgrading from a 2nd-Gen i5 to a 10th-Gen i7. In this case, then it's a judgment call, depending on the usage pattern and whether there are viable alternatives of the same GPU generation (regardless of the CPU brand).
 
Hey there Ace. How many 8 core parts were available in 2015?
I counted 42 on ark.intel.com available by the end of 2014, many of which would run on this old X79 board I have. I got it in April 2012 but it came out in late 2011. Yeah I did a brain fart and counted 2014 chips instead of 2015. Oops. Still came up with 42. That's enough that I'm going to just go ahead and be too lazy to do a recount. I may be a bit off on that number. It was a quick count and I only looked at Xeon E5s and E7s, plus some of them may have been discontinued by the end of 2014. Also 10, 12 , 14, 16 and 18 core chips were available by the end of 2014, though I think my old X79 board tops out at 12 cores since it only supports up to Ivy Bridge E/EP. There were also some 8 core AMD bulldozer-based Athlon models plus Opteron models with 8 or more. So the answer is actually... lots! The catch is that if you limit it to regular "desktop" chips your only 8-core option in back then would have been an AMD Bulldozer-based proc and we all know how well that went.

Personally I think people who think a new machine is much snappier in regular desktop use are either coming from a something just plain cheap, a machine with a mechanical hard drive, not enough ram, or let Windows get gunked up with bloatware and drive-by installs. An old Sandy Bridge i5 is just fine for regular desktop stuff. Web browsing, etc. Even some games are ok. Just please get an SSD. SATA is ok (but get a PCI-e M.2 if your board has a slot for one and you're buying a drive). It's the latency of a mechanical drive that makes you miserable. Of course if you do something that actually loads up the machine then yes, the new ones with more cores are much better. Same with PCI-e NVMe drives.
 
Personally I think people who think a new machine is much snappier in regular desktop use are either coming from a something just plain cheap, a machine with a mechanical hard drive, not enough ram, or let Windows get gunked up with bloatware and drive-by installs.
I'll go one step more pessimistic and say it's pretty much entirely placebo effect. They are the same people who put ebay intakes on their car and "feel a noticeable improvement" when in fact dyno tests show no difference or even a loss in most cases.
 
I counted 42 on ark.intel.com available by the end of 2014, many of which would run on this old X79 board I have. I got it in April 2012 but it came out in late 2011. Yeah I did a brain fart and counted 2014 chips instead of 2015. Oops. Still came up with 42. That's enough that I'm going to just go ahead and be too lazy to do a recount. I may be a bit off on that number. It was a quick count and I only looked at Xeon E5s and E7s, plus some of them may have been discontinued by the end of 2014. Also 10, 12 , 14, 16 and 18 core chips were available by the end of 2014, though I think my old X79 board tops out at 12 cores since it only supports up to Ivy Bridge E/EP. There were also some 8 core AMD bulldozer-based Athlon models plus Opteron models with 8 or more. So the answer is actually... lots! The catch is that if you limit it to regular "desktop" chips your only 8-core option in back then would have been an AMD Bulldozer-based proc and we all know how well that went.

Personally I think people who think a new machine is much snappier in regular desktop use are either coming from a something just plain cheap, a machine with a mechanical hard drive, not enough ram, or let Windows get gunked up with bloatware and drive-by installs. An old Sandy Bridge i5 is just fine for regular desktop stuff. Web browsing, etc. Even some games are ok. Just please get an SSD. SATA is ok (but get a PCI-e M.2 if your board has a slot for one and you're buying a drive). It's the latency of a mechanical drive that makes you miserable. Of course if you do something that actually loads up the machine then yes, the new ones with more cores are much better. Same with PCI-e NVMe drives.
I deleted my post because I don't want to feed the trolls but you quoted it so I now have to respond.

Desktop platform, son. That's what we're talking about here.

Desktop to Desktop Intel platform upgrade between 2010 (SandyBridge) and 2015 (SkyLake) the only options were 4 core chips so I bought what was available.

Implying someone made a dumb upgrade decision for not moving from desktop to HEDT (to get moar cores) is an ignorant statement and it's the only feasible explanation to what's-his-face earlier comment.
 
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Through 2014 there was only one 8 core part for consumer the 5960x which came out in 2014 lol.
 
I had an Intel 2500K, Radeon 5850, 150GB 10K Raptor to a Xeon E3-1231 v3, Nvidia GTX 950, 250GB SSD to an AMD 3900X, RTX 2070S, Gen4 1TB NVME. Prior to the 2500K I remember upgrading more often. I think average customers got tired of upgrading and companies have figured out how to satisfy the masses while charging a premium for minimal performance increases. Instead of getting leaps in performance from innovation, we get a trickling golden shower. Now we get the generation of fuck your performance I got the newest while you are on last year's POS gen and if it don't got RGB add an extra $250 to make it like a rave inside my computer case. I mean holy fuck cold cathode kits weren't this expensive when only three places sold them hahaha.
 
Prior to consumer core ct wars, content creation as hobby/lucrative hustle, consumer io ceiling exponentially increased via nvme, I used a 4c/8t e3 Xeon to make a living.

2c/4t laptops were the norm.

I’d argue the 4c/8t still has a place in gaming unless you’re trying to chase edge case framerate.

Work is what I focus my builds around, that’s more important than gaming.
I could run a separate build for non essentials, and I do.
 
Hey!

I've been using 2500k at 4.5 GHz since 2011. I use it for work and playing Overwatch. I was thinking about upgrading since Overwatch performance got terrible lately. However the software I use for work relies heavily on single core performance. So I'd like to get a noticeable boost in this area as well to justify spending $800 or so. I looked through some benchmark results and in many test (like Cinebench R20 single-core for example) 10700k beats 2500k by about 70% which is great. But in CPU-Z it's just 25-30% faster.

Why does the difference varies so much between the two? Is it really worth upgrading in my case? Thanks.
Defiantly a day late since you already have your machine but to explain the differences between the two. This is just a guess but I would venture to say that Cinebench is using a new instruction set that the 10700k has that the 2500k does not which gives the additional 40-45% increase in speed. My guess was going to be unless you are using an application that uses a new instruction set heavily the upgrade would only see a 25-30% increase in speed.

I remember looking at upgrading my 2600 4-5 years back. While newer cpus were faster, most of the performance gains were clock speed increase and only about 10-15% were ipc increase. Since you had yours already overclocked you already had a lot of the gains.
 
Not necessarily new instruction sets, pretty much everything gets updated with a new architecture so even without using the new stuff like avx or whatever it will run faster as it has been further optimised.
 
Weird coincidence that this thread is active. I was just going to refurb my old 2600K with some spare parts and see how it performs as a basic task/browsing rig.
 
2600K should be fine for that. However, I do find 10700K at 5GHz all cores with 32 gigs of RAM to be a bit more responsive in day to day tasks than my olde system (2500K at 4.5, 8GB RAM). For example switching YouTube to full screen and back happens faster and smoother. Sometimes my old system had small hick-ups when I was scrolling through heavy web pages or switching tabs and such. But I was running my 2500K on Windows 7 and now I'm using a clean Windows 10 install so it's not a 100% fair comparison.
 
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TBH if you insist on Intel I don't see why you don't buy a 9900K instead.

The performance is nearly identical to the 10700k and you can get it on sale for just $320.

Of course for single threaded performance the 5600X will blow away both at $299 price point as well.

As far as Intel favored apps, are you sure that's still the case? For example Ryzen 5000's superior single threaded IPC now makes it better in former Intel strongholds like Adobe Premiere.

I'd check the new benchmarks again and then decide.
 
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