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
The Market
At this point in time, Intel is primarily competing with itself. Because the enterprise market requires consistency, the HEDT platform is constrained to that three year, two product cycle, which maintains enough consistency in socket compatibility to keep the enterprise partners happy. When Intel has 95%+ of the HEDT and x86 enterprise market, rather than increasing market share to generate revenue, Intel has to convince users on older systems that their new products are worth the investment. That’s an easy sell in the enterprise market, as time is money and total cost of ownership for a system is typically well documented for cyclical updates.
For HEDT, making that case to prosumers can be difficult. It depends on budgets and how applications are developing, especially when a number of popular professional software packages are (where possible) trying to leverage PCIe accelerators. There will always be a strong market for CPU performance, and there will always be a market for HEDT, depending on the price. But at some point the HEDT and Xeon markets do collide, and the two main factors on this are price and availability.
As mentioned earlier, the newly introduced Broadwell-E Core i7 parts collide in price with a number of Broadwell-EP Xeon parts, which could suggest that Intel wants to push potential prosumers (especially the professional ones) more into systems made by enterprise and workstation partners. These systems are typically sold with appropriate support, and the two platforms differ by a few features. The question becomes about who is buying HEDT: a number of users reading this will be gamers, and will not be interested in workstation sellers.
It’s a strange balance that Intel is trying to strike. Everyone wants more – whether they need it or not is a different conversation – but most enthusiasts say they want more. Intel states that as a company, it supports the gamers and the enthusiasts who want to push their consumer platforms to the fullest, and something like Broadwell-E does that. However a prohibitive price might reduce the potential number of next generation enthusiasts who want to play at the high-end.
X99 Refresh Motherboards
Throughout this month many of the regular motherboard manufacturers have either released, announced, or teased newer "refresh" motherboards using the LGA2011-3 socket and the X99 chipset. We’ve got a base roundup of all the new motherboards coming out of Computex planned, especially as new models are being announced and shown at the show. A couple of these landed on our desk for Broadwell-E testing, such as the MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon:
The Carbon is a relatively new brand for MSI’s motherboard range, typically on the high-end models, and this one aims for a deep black aesthetic that is enhanced through the additional LED lighting.
We also have in the ASUS X99-E-10G WS motherboard, ASUS’ high-end workstation and prosumer based motherboard that also integrates an Intel X550-T2 10 gigabit Ethernet chip offering two 10GBase-T ports. We’ve seen this before on the ASRock X99 WS-E/10G, which used the X540-T2, and required eight PCIe 3.0 lanes from the CPU to provide enough bandwidth. We were only able to test the ASUS 10G board for a couple of days before leaving for Computex, and will have a preview up shortly.
ASRock also sent us their X99X Killer, although the courier tried to deliver on a day where I spent 30 minutes gathering stuff for the Computex trip. Go figure. It’ll be ready to test when I get back!
This Review
As with every CPU launch, there are a number of different directions to take our review. In our review of the launch of the consumer Broadwell parts, the i7-5775C and the i5-5675C we examined the generational update over previous architectures, and thus won’t repeat those tests here. We have had almost every high-end desktop CPU since Sandy Bridge-E in-house at some point, although only the latest have been through our most recent benchmark suite. Due to timing, we were able to test all four of the new Broadwell-E processors, and retest the three Haswell-E processors, however we have a more limited dataset for comparison to Ivy Bridge-E, Sandy Bridge-E and Nehalem/Westmere. It will be interesting to see how the CPU performance for the HEDT has adjusted over the last five generations.
The other angle is the recent release of Intel’s Skylake mainstream focused processors, such as the i7-6700K and the i5-6600K, which feature a higher single core frequency but fewer cores and fewer memory channels, or the mainstream enthusiast focused Devil’s Canyon processors released back in July 2014. These have been tested on our latest range of benchmarks, and should make it clear where the latest mainstream-to-HEDT crossover should be.
Test Setup
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-6950X (10C/20T, 3.0-3.5 GHz) Intel Core i7-6900K (8C/16T, 3.2-3.7 GHz) Intel Core i7-6850K (6C/12T, 3.6-3.8 GHz) Intel Core i7-6800K (6C/12T, 3.4-3.6 GHz, 28 PCIe 3.0) |
| Motherboards | MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon |
| Cooling | Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsX DDR4-2400 C15 4x16GB 1.2V |
| Memory Settings | JEDEC @ 2400 |
| Video Cards | ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G ASUS R7 240 2GB |
| Hard Drive | Crucial MX200 1TB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 |
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to AMD for providing us with the R9 290X 4GB GPUs.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with GTX 980 Strix GPUs and the R7 240 DDR3 GPU.
Thank you to ASRock and ASUS for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU.
Thank you to Crucial for providing us with MX200 SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill and Corsair for providing us with memory.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
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Witek - Thursday, June 16, 2016 - link
@rodmunch69 - Yeah. I also almost 4 years on 3930K (at 3.2GHz->4.2GHz), which I got for something like 350$ at the time. And I still do not see anything better in similar price bracket. x86 arch is a shit, with limited instruction issue, substandard compilers targeting generic cpus, and power hungry circuits trying to workaround the arch limitations.The prices on these new CPUs are shit, and Intel do that because they do not have competition in high performance x86 market right now. I understand making 14nm chip is more costly than previous generations, but eh, still it is crazy. There is no point of using 14nm for desktop if it doesn't provide substantial performance boost or power saving, at similar price. I am seriously looking into ARM64, Power8, MIPS and other architectures (especially high core counts, or ones still in developement - like Out of the Box Computing Mill CPU), that can break this trend (at least on Linux). SPARC looks like highest performance at the moment, but the prices are crazy as hell. Intel Phi is also interesting for paralellized workloads, but the price is still very high (due to the smaller target market).
Zen will help bring these prices into check. 16 core Zen (32 threads) at 1000$ would be awesome, and will bring all these Intel i7 cpus prices down substantially too.
vivs26 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Looking at single threaded and multi threaded performance cant help but be reminded of Amdahl's law. The performance you can extract out of your system is only as much your workload allows you to ....ithehappy - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
I am still on i7 950, just with a GTX970, will it be worth it if I get the 6800K? Or shall I still wait for Skylake-E? Gaming is my main priority, and low power consumption, because mine is on nearly 24x7.rhysiam - Wednesday, June 1, 2016 - link
If all you care about is gaming, get an i7 6700K. There's almost no value proposition in these CPUs anymore unless you absolutely need more than 4 cores. Very few games have been shown to benefit from more than 4 cores at all, and the hyperthreading on the i7 6700K will be there to help if (probably when) games finally start to scale better. The single threaded performance of the 6700K is also significantly better. If you have high end graphics and a 120/144hz display, where CPU performance can sometimes start to matter, the 6700K is actually the faster CPU, and would net you higher fps than any of these overpriced Broadwell-E CPUs.The only argument you could make is that at some point in the future games might start to benefit from 6+ cores. We've already seen in gaming benchmarks of i5s vs i3s vs Pentiums that hyperthreading does a surprisingly good job at mitigating the impact of a game running more threads than you have CPU cores. There's a very good chance that the 4 Core + HT of an i7 6700K will hold its own in gaming for a long time to come. Even if that turns out to not be the case, you'd be much better off in the long run just upgrading your machine when you need it rather than sinking money into a Broadwell-E system now.
mapesdhs - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
Re your power consumption, if that's because you care about long term cost, then there's a lot of utility in used hw such as a 3930K. It'll give a very good boost, it's much easier to oc than the later models, it's cheap, the platform supports broad SLI/CF, and it'd take years for the slightly higher power consumption of a 4.8 3930K to wipe out the huge cost saving vs. a 3930K (BIN for 96 UKP on eBay UK atm). It'll also better exploit future improvements in game design that support more cores.If you do want something new though, then rhysiam is right, 6700K or 4790K is fine.
Or go for something inbetween, like a used 4930K (costs a bit more, but higher IPC and some other benefits over SB-E).
However, if you do want something new, then rhysiam is right, the 6700K is plenty, or indeed a 4790K.
asmian - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Quite apart from cost/performance, the key question for some is whether this last version of Broadwell has had retrofitted the SGX extensions that were introduced with Skylake. Was this feature left out as it wasn't part of the original Broadwell platform? (Preferable) lack of SGX will mean this is the last secure-from-remote-snooping Intel processor release, otherwise the last will unfortunately be Haswell/Haswell-E.Anandtech has been conspicuously silent on SGX and why this is a privacy nightmare for users, unable to monitor or detect exactly what software may be secretly running on their processors due to a by-design inability to snoop on the process in-use memory. The benign use cases usually put forward hardly outweigh the risk of mode-adoption by virii, trojans and user-snooping malware of government origin, able to obfuscate their own remote loading, which would potentially be immune from detection by any means (likely including by the AV and anti-malware industry).
For more on why SGX is of concern read http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.uk/2013_08_0... and http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.co.uk/2013_09_0...
Please confirm definitively whether Broadwell-E has SGX or not.
Jvboom - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
This is so disappointing. Every time a new release comes out I come on here hoping to justify buying. The numbers just aren't there for the $$.Tchamber - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Is anyone else disappointed that a new, cutting-edge CPU consumes 10W more than my 2010 i7 970 with the same number of cores? Add to that, prices go up faster than performance does. That makes it nice to see that CPUs don't make much difference in gaming. There are plenty of features I'd like, but I can wait till Zen comes out. In all honesty, I'll probably buy Zen just to support the underdog.krypto1300 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link
Man, and I'm still getting by with my workhorse 1366 platform from 6 years ago. Running a Xeon X5650 @ 3.66GHz , 16GB of DDR31866 and a GTX 970! Everything still runs great! Doom and Project Cars do 1440P @ 60fps no problem!mapesdhs - Thursday, June 9, 2016 - link
A good example that shows the continued utility of what IMO was the last really ground-breaking new chipset release. I can remember reading every review I could find at the time about Nehalem and X58. Not done that since.Btw, are you by any chance using a Gigabyte board? 8)