Jay from Jay's Two Cents recently shared his experience with one of his CPUs and noticed something similar with another CPU. He believes that this is definitely a known issue, and they've tried everything from reinstalling Windows to reinstalling GTA drivers, XMP changes, and overclocking. However, the issue persists.

He mentioned that dropping XMP when turning off the profile and going down to 2133 MHz seems to alleviate some of the problem but still leaves it present. They haven't fully figured out the cause yet, but benchmarks show that the two affected CPUs have a slight performance anomaly compared to other processors in similar games. Jay suspects that there might be some sort of GTA issue when testing with a iCAN fig, and anyone who's got thoughts on this post should share their opinions in the comments below.

The charts showing the average FPS of 101 for the I5 2500k with overclocking, pushing up to 124 FPS average, compare favorably to the i72600k. However, there's not a significant advantage seen from the extra threads and cores offered by these processors. The frequency seems to provide the biggest impact to performance, at least in most games.

In contrast, the I5 3570k operates about 11 FPS faster than the stock I5 2500k. Other I5s like the 6600 and 7600k seem to have some issues but are still able to achieve averages of around 123-129 FPS. Jay and his team have done extensive research on these processors, trying everything from Windows reinstallations to completely fresh platforms, drivers, CPU changes, XMP changes, overclocking, and even checking the memory bus or memory controller speed.

However, they haven't been able to figure out what's causing the issues with those two specific CPUs. The 2500k has held up relatively well over the past five years but is now starting to show its age in a few specific games, particularly Watch Dogs 2. They're seeing sizable differences between modern CPUs on this particular title, and multicore does seem to matter more for that game.

In addition, Jay pointed out that they've seen big gains from overclocking in many games, especially since the 2500k was so easy to overclock. If you have one of these processors, it might be worth giving it a good cooler, like an AIo, and pushing it up to 4.5 GHz for the remainder of its life.

Blender and rendering tasks are particularly abusive to the I5 2500K, with modern CPUs outpacing it nearly two-fold. This suggests that it's now a good time to upgrade from this processor. Modern GPUs might get bottlenecked by the I5 2500K, especially if you're aiming for anything above the 1060 and 480 class, such as the 1070 and 1080, or whatever Vega may bring.

Normally, Jay wouldn't recommend waiting for CPU upgrades unless there's something specific you want. A lot of the time is spent waiting for component upgrades in general because there's always something new on the horizon, but Zen is close enough to wait now that it should be launching next month.

If a new Intel CPU were coming out next month, Jay might suggest not waiting just because we know their gains are pretty small on average generally. However, if you need a system now, it's worth buying. Zen is a big deal for AMD, as they haven't released anything major in several years since this CPU came out.

In conclusion, the I5 2500K has held up well but is starting to show its age. It might be time to upgrade, especially if you're planning on using it with modern GPUs. The 7600k or 6600k might be worth looking into, as they offer similar performance at a potentially lower price point. Alternatively, an i9-4690K could also be considered if one can find it for cheap.

That's all Jay has to say about the I5 2500K for now. If you want to see more results or further analysis, check out the link in the description below, where there are additional benchmarks and some further discussion on these processors. As always, subscribe for more content, and support Jay through his Patreon link for exclusive rewards.

For those interested in watching the full video, it's available on YouTube, along with other videos from Jay's channel, which can be found in the description below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe Intel Core i5 2500 K was easily the most popular processor of its time alongside the 2600k Sandy Bridge has been able to hold strong through several generations of Intel processors and amd's next big architecture launch is only just now occurring Zen should be here in February and K lake has already arrived so now it seems like a good time to finally start considering upgrades from Sandy bridge and that's what we're testing today before get into that this coverage is brought to you by thermal and their core P3 ATX case which is wall mountable and can act as an easy access test bench with high quality materials learn more at the link in the description below in this revisit of the I5 2500k Sandy Bridge processor we'll be testing Sandy brid's staying power into 2017 we've got the 2600k on here but we're focusing on the 2500k for today this includes blender rendering speed so that would be a production application and workload which is a bit more unique because there's some multi-threading Advantage there and we'll be looking at a handful of modern games Watch Dogs 2 Battlefield 1 all of those a couple of synthetic tests just to provide a baseline of numbers and this testing is limited to Performance so we're looking at FPS and completion time for benchmarks thermals power all of that stuff's been done for this processor and it hasn't changed so we're not going to be revisiting it today the 2500k shipped alongside the 60 series of chipsets or the six series that would be things like z68 if you remember that chipset and platform but it was also compatible with z77 motherboards critically and that's sort of still true today where we have z170 and z270 have some inter compatibility depending on which CPU you're looking at for potential upgrade the 2500 K also has a base frequency of 3.3 gahz and it turbo is up to 3.7 GHz and it can fairly effortlessly overclock to 4.5 GHz or thereabouts with maybe 1.3 voltage and you can tune plus or minus based on your particular processor with the right cooler so was a flexible CPU and now it's just important to see how it's held up as for TDP and other specs the CPU had the same TDP as modern Intel CPUs though it's significantly less powerful and operates at a lower clock rate which are hand inand the memory support on the 2500 K was also limited and is somewhat critical to Performance changes in some specific applications the right motherboard went a long way in this regard you could still run higher memory speeds but still not anything like what we have today and of course there's a DDR3 versus ddr4 change as well and in case anyone's forgotten iio has changed a lot since 2011 so hsio now consists of things like M2 nvme and a whole slew of devices that are enabled via the pcie bus and that's not really something that was that popular or even in some cases like nvme didn't even exist when the CPU came out especially not in consumer applications so that's a big change and is something you should account for with upgrade plans because moving forward even if the percent gains may be minimal in some use cases the advantage from new IO devices could be a lot higher than just a raw CPU gain and of course PCI Gen 3 is now everywhere and USB 3 multiple generations of it even gen one and gen two have pretty much proliferated the market so the Market's been shaking up a lot for Io and that's probably the biggest change here other than the usual clock rate and because we're testing so many CPUs on different platforms that means that we have multiple task benches to define those are all defined in the article links in the description below which also contains a few extra charts that won't be in this video check that link if you have any questions about what motherboard was used and what memory was used because we'll be changing between DDR3 and 4 of course as we iterate through the CPU generations and that's all defined in the article test methodology page one more thing to note here before getting started this is our edition of I5 CPUs to the CPU Benchmark this was promised in our i77700k review next will be to add i3s and FX CPUs each one of these sort of uh Core Series updates does take a lot of work so we're doing them incrementally FX ass soon I3 ass soon and that is in preparation of course for Zen and for the I3 kbl Lake CPUs that we'll be looking at shortly the first test is our blender Benchmark that gn's Andrew Coleman made the full methodology is on the site again but the basics are that we're rendering a 4K image of these various monkey heads each monkey has different effects applied to it all stressing the components in different ways during GPU benchmarking for instance we noticed that the fur monkey stresses GPU memory in some ways that are not the same for CPUs as the chart demonstrates this is a benchmark where multi-threaded CPUs really Shine the additional threads are fully utilized for each 16x16 tile that we render so two times the threads means two times the active inflight tiles being rendered simultaneously we already talked i7 numbers in the 7700k reviews so we're focusing on the Core i5 CPUs today the Intel i5 2500 K with its stock frequency settings is able to render our scene in 106 minutes making it the slowest device on the bench by a lawn shot the 3570k CPU released about a year later in second quarter 2012 completes the frame in 94 minutes a modern CPU like last gen's I5 6600 K is able to complete that task in 73 minutes and of course the 7600k is a bit faster than that so we're looking at about a 30 minute faster render time over the 2500k or a reduction of about 31% time required between the 2500k and the 6600k if you're rendering using the CPU as you might do if running both GPU and CPU on a render task then the upgrade is clearly substantial and something that should have been done a long time ago to provide some perspective for Sandy Bridge the same gen i72600k is able to render the scene in about the same time as an i5 6600 k a multigenerational difference at 74 minutes if you bought an i7 2600k back in the day you're still in pretty decent shape in this particular Benchmark at least compared to today's I5 CPUs a trivial overclock to 4.5 GHz on the 2500 K moves us up to an 82 minute render time absolutely a worthwhile Improvement and if you're stuck on the CPU rendering things for a while it's probably something that should be done let's move on to cinebench synthetics we're seeing the I5 2500k operate expectedly at the bottom of the bench the 2500k is pushing single core performance at 24 CB marks with multicore at 460 marks the overclocked variant at 4.5 GHz again pretty easy performs ahead of the I5 3570k stock CPU and just under the i54690k in a single core and even in multi-core performance 3D Mark fire strike is posting the I5 2500k at 13498 total points or 6190 on physics and that's the score We Care the most about since it isolates the CPU and removes the GPU from the equation the 3570k saw marginal improvements to 6808 and the 2600k is pretty heavily improved in physics with its 9033 score as for what this means in practice here's the 3D Mark FPS output we're seeing a physics FPS of 19.7 on the 2500k compared to 26 when overclocked the I5 3570k and 4690k both fall between the stock and overclock 2500k CPUs there's some variance to testing with 3D Mark so keep that in mind but these these results are reliable nonetheless there is just a bit of variance between tests and that's all synthetic of course and there's only so far we can get with synthetics we've got time spy benchmarks in the article linked below if you'd like to see more but with newer apis but let's move on to FPS benchmarks for now there are a lot of different ways to do game benchmarks for CPUs so again article below for the full methodology but the basics are we've mixed in some CPU limited games and then a couple that would appear to be GPU limited once you reach the high end but do show some pretty substantial changes as we approach the low end of CPUs where the GPU is now being bottlenecked by the CPU so they're still worthwhile to test and provide a fuller picture of actual performance across various games rather than just a whole bunch of carefully picked CPU benchmarks starting with Watchdogs 2 we can now reveal why we added this game to our cvu benchmarking workload with the high-end i7 CPUs we undoubtedly begin to battle with other system resources like the GPU even though it's a GTX 1080 FTW in the system and that means me the differences between the Skylake and kbl Lake i7 CPUs are harder to detect as we scale down though the CPU choke becomes readily apparent the 2500k is limiting our 1080 FTW to 59 FPS average when at 1080p with high settings and that's a card which is capable of achieving clearly at least two xat performance when using the latest i7 CPUs if you're running a stock I5 2500k this is about the maximum performance you can expect on our particular Benchmark course frame Time Performance performance isn't exactly bad it just scales linearly with the average the 3570k shows a reasonable Improvement but even that gain is outdone by an overclock on the 2500k to 4.5 GHz this isn't hard to do and can be held at around 1.3 volts though your mileage may vary and produces higher averages and 0.1% lows than the 3570k is capable of more interestingly we see the same gen 2600 K really stretch its legs and Watchdogs too producing an additional 15 or so frames per second than the 2500k this this is where you get your value in those i7 purchases several years ago better longevity mostly and it's probably one of the most interesting stories here we'll soon see if that carries over to other games though with Watch Dogs 2 we're generally seeing that multicore CPUs are advantaged and the I5 4690k and 4790 K i7 CPU have a sizable gap between them as well furthering this point but as for the 2500k versus modern CPU purchases a linear upgrade would land you on the 7600 or 6600k both of which produce an extra 20 FPS or so average frame rate throughput frame times improve in step with this and watch dogs is a game where you could generally get by with the lower FPS so the upgrade isn't necessary you could be pretty happy at 40 to 45 FPS if not a stickler for hitting 60 all the time but the point is that an upgrade would better allow for higher graphic settings we're at high here but moving to ultra would be more acceptable with a higher end CPU Battlefield 1 doesn't show as much change at the very high end where our 1080p ultra settings are landing the KB Lake Sky Lake and Devil's Canyon i7 CPUs is all roughly in the same performance range where we do see a change though is dropping down to the 2500k CPU the 2500k still performs reasonably well in Battlefield 1 despite becoming a bottleneck to the 1080 FTW and is operating at 115 FPS average with the overclocked version at 124 FPS average the 3570k performs about where the overclocked 2500k performs and the 4690k starts pulling away from the 2500 in a more dramatic fashion the CPU is certainly slower but still keeps up pretty well in Battlefield 1 only if you're pushing for higher refresh gameplay or upgrading into 1070 1080 class Hardware will a bottleneck be really noticeable to a point of requiring a CPU upgrade unlike Watch Dog 2 the difference between the i7 2600 and I5 2500 K CPUs is not as substantial Total War is new to our CPU bench and thus far only features I5 series CPUs before diving in note that total does output frame rates with a good amount of variance at the low end especially this means we won't really be using the 0.1% metric as much since it fluctuates pass toass and seems inconsistent overall we're also only testing with 3 xx11 because dx12 has some issues it's performance just isn't as good as the X11 and so we're not testing it we're seeing the 2500 K perform at about 92 FPS with 1080P and high settings for this Benchmark overclocking provides substantial gains pushing us up to 114 FPS average with both aled frame times the performance Improvement is about 24% absolutely worth the overclock for sure and looking to Modern CPUs the 6600k is capable of operating at 156 average with the 7600k at 165 average from the 2500k to the 7600k we're seeing a stock clock rate difference totaling and resulting in 73 FPS average or a percentage increase of about 80% the final Benchmark is GTA 5 and we had some confusing issues with this one that arose I still want to include the Benchmark because it's accurate for every other CPU except for two of them and those are something uh they require some further investigation maybe someone out there has encountered this but basically with the 6600k and 7600k we were seeing some stuttering that was not occurring on the other CPUs making for slightly drag down averages but really heavily impacted 0.1% low values again only on those two CPUs the 66 and 7600k when I tweeted out we posted a tweet asking if anyone has seen this couple people responded Jay from Jay's two cents said he saw something similar in the past with one of his CPUs so it's definitely something that's known uh we've done everything from reinstalling Windows to reinstalling GTA drivers XMP changes all that stuff and the issue persists so this seems to be less of an ordeal when dropping XMP when turning off that profile and going down to something like 2133 MHz but it's still present still we haven't got it fully figured out out yet but the benchmarks are still good for everything else those two CPUs have a bit of an asterisk next to them because of that performance anomaly right now it looks like some sort of GTA issue when testing with aican fig if anyone's got thoughts on this post them below so the charts we're looking at an average FPS of 101 with the I5 2500k with overclocking pushing us to an impressive 124 FPS average compared to the i72600k there's not a lot of advantage in GTA 5 from the extra threads and we're seeing frequency seems to provide the biggest impact to performance at least for the most part the I5 3570k operates about 11 FPS faster than the stock i5 2500k and then again the other i5s 6600 and 7600k just seem to have some issues but are definitely at least 123 to 129 FPS in the averages we've done due diligence on these to try and figure out that issue with those two CPUs again Windows reinstall completely fresh platform drivers uh CPU changes XMP changes over clocks and not overclocks to check the memory bus or memory controller speed rather lots of things to try but didn't quite figure those two out so uh that's the way it goes sometimes for ashes of the singularity and Metro last Light if you want to see those results check the link for the full article in the description below as always and that'll contain additional benchmarks and some further analysis the 2500k has held up relatively well for the past 5 years but it's starting to show some serious age in a few specific games Watch Dogs 2 for one post Fair sizable differences between modern CPUs on the 2500k though multicore seems to matter more for that particular title we're also seeing big gains from overclocking in a lot of games especially because the 2500k was so easy to overclock if you've got one it might be worth throwing it under a good cooler maybe an aiio and pushing it for 4.5 GHz for the remainder of its life blender and rendering tasks are particularly abusive to the I5 2500 K which is being outpaced nearly twofold by modern success it's a good time to upgrade from the 2500 K the CPU has held on really well as as the 2600k and it's still hanging on but it is kind of nearing the end of life where Modern gpus if you're buying one might get bottlenecked by the I5 particularly if you're going for anything above 1060 and 480 class like the 1070 and 1080 and whatever Vega may bring so that means it is now good to look for kbl Lake and Zen now normally we don't really recommend waiting for CPU or GP or really just component upgrades in general Because unless there's something really specific you want a lot of the time uh is just waiting for the sake of waiting because you can wait forever in the computer hardware world there's always something new but Zen is very close at this point it should be launching next month and that's close enough to wait especially when you've already had the CPU for 5 years or so and also Zen now normally if a new Intel CV were coming out next month I might suggest not waiting just because we know their gains are pretty small on average generally if you need a system now it's worth buying Zen is a big deal for AMD they haven't released anything major for several years now almost since this CPU came out the 2500k so it's worth waiting around if you can to see how it goes we'll revisit the topic when we review the ryzen CPUs for now it's either a 7600k or 6600k if you can find one for cheaper than the kbl lake Alternatives because basically the same uh but if they're used or something you can get cheaper go for it but uh a 4690k might also be worth looking into if you can find one for cheap on New Egg Amazon or somewhere they're dumping a bunch of them to to make room on the shelves but that's all I got for you so 2500k pretty interesting results especially in Watch Dog 2 subscribe for more as always patreon Link in the postal video links in the description below for more information I'll see you all next timethe Intel Core i5 2500 K was easily the most popular processor of its time alongside the 2600k Sandy Bridge has been able to hold strong through several generations of Intel processors and amd's next big architecture launch is only just now occurring Zen should be here in February and K lake has already arrived so now it seems like a good time to finally start considering upgrades from Sandy bridge and that's what we're testing today before get into that this coverage is brought to you by thermal and their core P3 ATX case which is wall mountable and can act as an easy access test bench with high quality materials learn more at the link in the description below in this revisit of the I5 2500k Sandy Bridge processor we'll be testing Sandy brid's staying power into 2017 we've got the 2600k on here but we're focusing on the 2500k for today this includes blender rendering speed so that would be a production application and workload which is a bit more unique because there's some multi-threading Advantage there and we'll be looking at a handful of modern games Watch Dogs 2 Battlefield 1 all of those a couple of synthetic tests just to provide a baseline of numbers and this testing is limited to Performance so we're looking at FPS and completion time for benchmarks thermals power all of that stuff's been done for this processor and it hasn't changed so we're not going to be revisiting it today the 2500k shipped alongside the 60 series of chipsets or the six series that would be things like z68 if you remember that chipset and platform but it was also compatible with z77 motherboards critically and that's sort of still true today where we have z170 and z270 have some inter compatibility depending on which CPU you're looking at for potential upgrade the 2500 K also has a base frequency of 3.3 gahz and it turbo is up to 3.7 GHz and it can fairly effortlessly overclock to 4.5 GHz or thereabouts with maybe 1.3 voltage and you can tune plus or minus based on your particular processor with the right cooler so was a flexible CPU and now it's just important to see how it's held up as for TDP and other specs the CPU had the same TDP as modern Intel CPUs though it's significantly less powerful and operates at a lower clock rate which are hand inand the memory support on the 2500 K was also limited and is somewhat critical to Performance changes in some specific applications the right motherboard went a long way in this regard you could still run higher memory speeds but still not anything like what we have today and of course there's a DDR3 versus ddr4 change as well and in case anyone's forgotten iio has changed a lot since 2011 so hsio now consists of things like M2 nvme and a whole slew of devices that are enabled via the pcie bus and that's not really something that was that popular or even in some cases like nvme didn't even exist when the CPU came out especially not in consumer applications so that's a big change and is something you should account for with upgrade plans because moving forward even if the percent gains may be minimal in some use cases the advantage from new IO devices could be a lot higher than just a raw CPU gain and of course PCI Gen 3 is now everywhere and USB 3 multiple generations of it even gen one and gen two have pretty much proliferated the market so the Market's been shaking up a lot for Io and that's probably the biggest change here other than the usual clock rate and because we're testing so many CPUs on different platforms that means that we have multiple task benches to define those are all defined in the article links in the description below which also contains a few extra charts that won't be in this video check that link if you have any questions about what motherboard was used and what memory was used because we'll be changing between DDR3 and 4 of course as we iterate through the CPU generations and that's all defined in the article test methodology page one more thing to note here before getting started this is our edition of I5 CPUs to the CPU Benchmark this was promised in our i77700k review next will be to add i3s and FX CPUs each one of these sort of uh Core Series updates does take a lot of work so we're doing them incrementally FX ass soon I3 ass soon and that is in preparation of course for Zen and for the I3 kbl Lake CPUs that we'll be looking at shortly the first test is our blender Benchmark that gn's Andrew Coleman made the full methodology is on the site again but the basics are that we're rendering a 4K image of these various monkey heads each monkey has different effects applied to it all stressing the components in different ways during GPU benchmarking for instance we noticed that the fur monkey stresses GPU memory in some ways that are not the same for CPUs as the chart demonstrates this is a benchmark where multi-threaded CPUs really Shine the additional threads are fully utilized for each 16x16 tile that we render so two times the threads means two times the active inflight tiles being rendered simultaneously we already talked i7 numbers in the 7700k reviews so we're focusing on the Core i5 CPUs today the Intel i5 2500 K with its stock frequency settings is able to render our scene in 106 minutes making it the slowest device on the bench by a lawn shot the 3570k CPU released about a year later in second quarter 2012 completes the frame in 94 minutes a modern CPU like last gen's I5 6600 K is able to complete that task in 73 minutes and of course the 7600k is a bit faster than that so we're looking at about a 30 minute faster render time over the 2500k or a reduction of about 31% time required between the 2500k and the 6600k if you're rendering using the CPU as you might do if running both GPU and CPU on a render task then the upgrade is clearly substantial and something that should have been done a long time ago to provide some perspective for Sandy Bridge the same gen i72600k is able to render the scene in about the same time as an i5 6600 k a multigenerational difference at 74 minutes if you bought an i7 2600k back in the day you're still in pretty decent shape in this particular Benchmark at least compared to today's I5 CPUs a trivial overclock to 4.5 GHz on the 2500 K moves us up to an 82 minute render time absolutely a worthwhile Improvement and if you're stuck on the CPU rendering things for a while it's probably something that should be done let's move on to cinebench synthetics we're seeing the I5 2500k operate expectedly at the bottom of the bench the 2500k is pushing single core performance at 24 CB marks with multicore at 460 marks the overclocked variant at 4.5 GHz again pretty easy performs ahead of the I5 3570k stock CPU and just under the i54690k in a single core and even in multi-core performance 3D Mark fire strike is posting the I5 2500k at 13498 total points or 6190 on physics and that's the score We Care the most about since it isolates the CPU and removes the GPU from the equation the 3570k saw marginal improvements to 6808 and the 2600k is pretty heavily improved in physics with its 9033 score as for what this means in practice here's the 3D Mark FPS output we're seeing a physics FPS of 19.7 on the 2500k compared to 26 when overclocked the I5 3570k and 4690k both fall between the stock and overclock 2500k CPUs there's some variance to testing with 3D Mark so keep that in mind but these these results are reliable nonetheless there is just a bit of variance between tests and that's all synthetic of course and there's only so far we can get with synthetics we've got time spy benchmarks in the article linked below if you'd like to see more but with newer apis but let's move on to FPS benchmarks for now there are a lot of different ways to do game benchmarks for CPUs so again article below for the full methodology but the basics are we've mixed in some CPU limited games and then a couple that would appear to be GPU limited once you reach the high end but do show some pretty substantial changes as we approach the low end of CPUs where the GPU is now being bottlenecked by the CPU so they're still worthwhile to test and provide a fuller picture of actual performance across various games rather than just a whole bunch of carefully picked CPU benchmarks starting with Watchdogs 2 we can now reveal why we added this game to our cvu benchmarking workload with the high-end i7 CPUs we undoubtedly begin to battle with other system resources like the GPU even though it's a GTX 1080 FTW in the system and that means me the differences between the Skylake and kbl Lake i7 CPUs are harder to detect as we scale down though the CPU choke becomes readily apparent the 2500k is limiting our 1080 FTW to 59 FPS average when at 1080p with high settings and that's a card which is capable of achieving clearly at least two xat performance when using the latest i7 CPUs if you're running a stock I5 2500k this is about the maximum performance you can expect on our particular Benchmark course frame Time Performance performance isn't exactly bad it just scales linearly with the average the 3570k shows a reasonable Improvement but even that gain is outdone by an overclock on the 2500k to 4.5 GHz this isn't hard to do and can be held at around 1.3 volts though your mileage may vary and produces higher averages and 0.1% lows than the 3570k is capable of more interestingly we see the same gen 2600 K really stretch its legs and Watchdogs too producing an additional 15 or so frames per second than the 2500k this this is where you get your value in those i7 purchases several years ago better longevity mostly and it's probably one of the most interesting stories here we'll soon see if that carries over to other games though with Watch Dogs 2 we're generally seeing that multicore CPUs are advantaged and the I5 4690k and 4790 K i7 CPU have a sizable gap between them as well furthering this point but as for the 2500k versus modern CPU purchases a linear upgrade would land you on the 7600 or 6600k both of which produce an extra 20 FPS or so average frame rate throughput frame times improve in step with this and watch dogs is a game where you could generally get by with the lower FPS so the upgrade isn't necessary you could be pretty happy at 40 to 45 FPS if not a stickler for hitting 60 all the time but the point is that an upgrade would better allow for higher graphic settings we're at high here but moving to ultra would be more acceptable with a higher end CPU Battlefield 1 doesn't show as much change at the very high end where our 1080p ultra settings are landing the KB Lake Sky Lake and Devil's Canyon i7 CPUs is all roughly in the same performance range where we do see a change though is dropping down to the 2500k CPU the 2500k still performs reasonably well in Battlefield 1 despite becoming a bottleneck to the 1080 FTW and is operating at 115 FPS average with the overclocked version at 124 FPS average the 3570k performs about where the overclocked 2500k performs and the 4690k starts pulling away from the 2500 in a more dramatic fashion the CPU is certainly slower but still keeps up pretty well in Battlefield 1 only if you're pushing for higher refresh gameplay or upgrading into 1070 1080 class Hardware will a bottleneck be really noticeable to a point of requiring a CPU upgrade unlike Watch Dog 2 the difference between the i7 2600 and I5 2500 K CPUs is not as substantial Total War is new to our CPU bench and thus far only features I5 series CPUs before diving in note that total does output frame rates with a good amount of variance at the low end especially this means we won't really be using the 0.1% metric as much since it fluctuates pass toass and seems inconsistent overall we're also only testing with 3 xx11 because dx12 has some issues it's performance just isn't as good as the X11 and so we're not testing it we're seeing the 2500 K perform at about 92 FPS with 1080P and high settings for this Benchmark overclocking provides substantial gains pushing us up to 114 FPS average with both aled frame times the performance Improvement is about 24% absolutely worth the overclock for sure and looking to Modern CPUs the 6600k is capable of operating at 156 average with the 7600k at 165 average from the 2500k to the 7600k we're seeing a stock clock rate difference totaling and resulting in 73 FPS average or a percentage increase of about 80% the final Benchmark is GTA 5 and we had some confusing issues with this one that arose I still want to include the Benchmark because it's accurate for every other CPU except for two of them and those are something uh they require some further investigation maybe someone out there has encountered this but basically with the 6600k and 7600k we were seeing some stuttering that was not occurring on the other CPUs making for slightly drag down averages but really heavily impacted 0.1% low values again only on those two CPUs the 66 and 7600k when I tweeted out we posted a tweet asking if anyone has seen this couple people responded Jay from Jay's two cents said he saw something similar in the past with one of his CPUs so it's definitely something that's known uh we've done everything from reinstalling Windows to reinstalling GTA drivers XMP changes all that stuff and the issue persists so this seems to be less of an ordeal when dropping XMP when turning off that profile and going down to something like 2133 MHz but it's still present still we haven't got it fully figured out out yet but the benchmarks are still good for everything else those two CPUs have a bit of an asterisk next to them because of that performance anomaly right now it looks like some sort of GTA issue when testing with aican fig if anyone's got thoughts on this post them below so the charts we're looking at an average FPS of 101 with the I5 2500k with overclocking pushing us to an impressive 124 FPS average compared to the i72600k there's not a lot of advantage in GTA 5 from the extra threads and we're seeing frequency seems to provide the biggest impact to performance at least for the most part the I5 3570k operates about 11 FPS faster than the stock i5 2500k and then again the other i5s 6600 and 7600k just seem to have some issues but are definitely at least 123 to 129 FPS in the averages we've done due diligence on these to try and figure out that issue with those two CPUs again Windows reinstall completely fresh platform drivers uh CPU changes XMP changes over clocks and not overclocks to check the memory bus or memory controller speed rather lots of things to try but didn't quite figure those two out so uh that's the way it goes sometimes for ashes of the singularity and Metro last Light if you want to see those results check the link for the full article in the description below as always and that'll contain additional benchmarks and some further analysis the 2500k has held up relatively well for the past 5 years but it's starting to show some serious age in a few specific games Watch Dogs 2 for one post Fair sizable differences between modern CPUs on the 2500k though multicore seems to matter more for that particular title we're also seeing big gains from overclocking in a lot of games especially because the 2500k was so easy to overclock if you've got one it might be worth throwing it under a good cooler maybe an aiio and pushing it for 4.5 GHz for the remainder of its life blender and rendering tasks are particularly abusive to the I5 2500 K which is being outpaced nearly twofold by modern success it's a good time to upgrade from the 2500 K the CPU has held on really well as as the 2600k and it's still hanging on but it is kind of nearing the end of life where Modern gpus if you're buying one might get bottlenecked by the I5 particularly if you're going for anything above 1060 and 480 class like the 1070 and 1080 and whatever Vega may bring so that means it is now good to look for kbl Lake and Zen now normally we don't really recommend waiting for CPU or GP or really just component upgrades in general Because unless there's something really specific you want a lot of the time uh is just waiting for the sake of waiting because you can wait forever in the computer hardware world there's always something new but Zen is very close at this point it should be launching next month and that's close enough to wait especially when you've already had the CPU for 5 years or so and also Zen now normally if a new Intel CV were coming out next month I might suggest not waiting just because we know their gains are pretty small on average generally if you need a system now it's worth buying Zen is a big deal for AMD they haven't released anything major for several years now almost since this CPU came out the 2500k so it's worth waiting around if you can to see how it goes we'll revisit the topic when we review the ryzen CPUs for now it's either a 7600k or 6600k if you can find one for cheaper than the kbl lake Alternatives because basically the same uh but if they're used or something you can get cheaper go for it but uh a 4690k might also be worth looking into if you can find one for cheap on New Egg Amazon or somewhere they're dumping a bunch of them to to make room on the shelves but that's all I got for you so 2500k pretty interesting results especially in Watch Dog 2 subscribe for more as always patreon Link in the postal video links in the description below for more information I'll see you all next time\n"