**The Evolution of Processors: A Comparative Analysis**

In this article, we'll delve into the world of processors and explore how they've evolved over time. To demonstrate just how far processors have come, I decided to pit my old trusty Q6600 against a brand new 5960X processor from AMD. This experiment was designed to show just how much more efficient modern processors are compared to their older counterparts.

To make things interesting, I chose seven different benchmarks, three synthetic tests, and four games to put the two processors through their paces. First up, we have Cinebench R15, a popular benchmark that's often used to compare the performance of different processors. As you can see from the thread on the forum, there was a whopping 55% improvement in Cinebench R15 scores between the Q6600 and the 5960X. That may seem like a lot, but considering it's been seven years since the last major processor update, it's actually quite impressive.

The 3DMark test was fairly similar to the Cinebench results, with the 5960X pulling ahead of the Q6600 by a small margin. However, the 7-Zip test showed more significant differences between the two processors, with the 5960X beating out the Q6600 in both compression and decompression speeds.

**Real-World Gaming Performance**

Now it's time to move on to real-world gaming performance. We'll start with Tomb Raider, a game that's notorious for being CPU-bound. Unfortunately, even with this game, we didn't see any significant differences between the two processors. It seems that the Q6600 is still able to keep up with the 5960X in this particular game.

However, things started to get more interesting when we moved on to Far Cry 4. As we know from previous tests, Far Cry 4 isn't exactly CPU-friendly unless you're running it on dual cores. But even in single-core mode, the 5960X was able to pull ahead of the Q6600 by a significant margin.

The next game up was Dying Light, which showed more substantial differences between the two processors. The Q6600 struggled to maintain high frame rates, often dipping down to 15 FPS at minimums. In contrast, the 5960X was able to hold steady at around 25 FPS, even when things got more intense.

Finally, we have Cities Skylines, a game that's notorious for being CPU-intensive. Unfortunately, this proved to be one of the Q6600's greatest weaknesses. The game would stutter and chug along, barely able to manage itself at 1080p. In contrast, the 5960X was able to handle the game with ease, running smoothly even at high resolutions.

**Conclusion**

So what does all this mean? If you're already happy with your late-gen processor, don't feel pressured to upgrade just yet. While modern processors are certainly more efficient than their older counterparts, there's still a lot that can be done to improve performance. Overclocking can make a huge difference, and running games at lower resolutions or settings can also help.

However, if you're a speed freak who's been struggling with your older processor, this experiment should give you some hope. With the right tweaking and optimization, even an old Q6600 can be pushed to keep up with modern processors like the 5960X. Whether that's worth it is up to you, but one thing's for sure – processors have come a long way in just seven short years.

**Additional Notes**

If you're interested in learning more about how to optimize your system for better performance, I recommend checking out some of our other resources. We've got a wealth of information on overclocking and tweaking, as well as guides on how to get the most out of your hardware.

Additionally, if you're an anime fan looking for a new way to spend your time, I highly recommend checking out Crunchyroll Premium. With access to the latest episodes of new shows straight from Japan, as well as a large collection of popular anime series, this service is a must-have for any serious anime enthusiast.

Finally, be sure to check out our support page, where you can get a cool little badge under your profile picture whenever you post something on the forum. We also offer an affiliate link program that allows you to earn a small kickback whenever you buy things through our links. This is really helpful for us, and it adds up to make a big difference in the long run.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthere's an age-old question that gets asked all the time are all megahertz the same let's talk about that the cooler master nova touch tkl utilizes genuine topper hybrid capacitive switches and is now available at a more affordable price click now to learn more good tech tips morning i love gmm but what we're here to talk today about is the myth of megahertz not the awesome antics of rhett and link so let's set the stage there are many things that will determine a processor's effective speed when handling tasks but two of the most common ones are clock speed which is a given and ipc also known as instructions per clock which you'll hear a lot when it's thrown around as the banner of ipc improvements with every new processor launch right about now is when i would get you guys to click on the box to go check out the fastest possible episode explaining ipc but we don't have one as of yet so what i would suggest is you check out the kind of somewhat rough wikipedia article on the topic and other various sources we'll try to get a video about that out fairly soon ipc isn't necessarily just as simple as it sounds at first but intel claims generation after generation to have a usually around 10 general improvement does this improvement actually amount to anything wouldn't an old processor running at 2.4 gigahertz run just as well as a new processor running at 2.4 gigahertz and even if the improvements do amount to something will this show up in non-real-world synthetic tests only or will it actually be noticed let's find out the tools of the trade for today will be two different test machines one will be linus's scrapyard wars machine you haven't seen scrapyard wars first of all i'm genuinely surprised and second of all click here or something and then come back later we will be using the q6600 that which is running in his system at 2.4 gigahertz rocking four standard cores and no hyper threading alongside eight gigabytes of ram and a freaking gtx 980 from gigabyte wind force just to push the gpu bottleneck out of the way and see how effective the processor actually is at handling things our second system will be the standard gpu test bench machine with its smugly running 5960x but today it won't be running normally i've nerfed the 5960x down to 2.4 gigahertz and four colors with no hyper threading to match the clock speed and core count of the q6600 if you're interested in how core count can affect things check out my recent video here on course for gaming then i slapped eight gigabytes of ram onto the bench and the same winforce gtx 980 to even things up in order to pit these two systems against each other i picked a suite of seven different benchmarks three different synthetics and four games i'll start off with a forum favorite and that would be cinebench r15 check out the awesome cinebench r15 thread and other rs actually on the fort as you can see there's been a whopping 55 improvement that's pretty huge even given the seven year gap between these two processors and with our new fancy new chip majorly nerfed just for this experiment 3dmark and 7-zip tests were fairly similar with the 5960x actually slapping around the old weary q6600 but none of this was all that surprising but it's time to move on to stuff that you're probably more interested real world gaming performance first up we have tomb raider which showed essentially no difference between the two i really need to stop using tomb raider for anything other than gpu tests because it really doesn't scale with anything other than gpus at all well that story was boring so moving on next up we have far cry 4 which as we know from the course for gaming video isn't all that cpu bound unless you count not running on dual cores but regardless we do see a bit of an improvement here and that's nothing to scoff at but this is where it starts getting interesting dying light fairly substantial difference in average fps between the q6600 dipping all the way down to 15 fps at times for minimums and the 5960x holding a cool 25 fps for minimums also note that whenever there was a slightly more intense zombie action going on it would chug a bit and even crashed a few times on the q 6600 not a great experience last of all and oh did i save the best for last is cities skylines we just recently introduced this game into our testing suite and damn does it love processors and it really shows here with the q6600 there were stutters all freaking over the place it couldn't run 4k and it was barely able to manage itself at 1080p and it was just a horrible experience meanwhile the 5960x was just chilling no big deal so in conclusion what does all this mean well i hope it helped the show how things can improve more drastically over time than most the easy to read specs actually show if you're already happy with your late gen processor you don't need to run out and replace it this second it doesn't matter there are always other things that you can do as well overclocking can help a ton and you can just not run all your games at max like we just did that can help too but if you are a speed freak and you've been struggling to figure out why your older overclocked processor isn't performing quite as well as your buddy's stock processor running at the same frequencies hopefully this will help speaking of better than dessert crunchyroll if you're a fan of anime and haven't signed up for crunchyroll premium yet you should certainly give them a shot crunchyroll is a site created by anime fans for the other anime fans they offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from japan like kuroko's basketball 3 and jojo's bizarre adventure as well as a large collection of the most popular anime shows like one piece and naruto all professionally subtitled if you head over to crunchyroll.com linus you can sign up for a 30-day free trial of crunchyroll premium which is completely ad-free and if you enjoy any benefits of premium like 1080p streaming getting new episodes of shows straight from japan within an hour of their premiere and being able to stream anywhere anytime from a variety of devices even your phone tablet or heck wii u you can continue your premium membership to crunchyroll for only 6.95 per month so head over to crunchyroll.com linus and check them out personally i'm quite a fan of my 5 gigahertz 2600k but it may be time to upgrade soon let me know what you think down in the comments down below or better yet over on the forums while you're here like dislike favorite subscribe share do all that kind of stuff check the link in the video description down below to get a cool linus media group shirt there's a bunch of really cool ones and i actually have been running into people wearing them at conventions lately which is pretty sick over on the forum you can check out the support linus media group link where you can do cool stuff like changing your amazon affiliate code to ours that gives us a small kickback whenever you buy things and actually adds up to being really really helpful also if you want to become a contributor on the forum you can get a really cool little badge under your profile picture whenever you post things thanks for watching guys and i'll see you next timethere's an age-old question that gets asked all the time are all megahertz the same let's talk about that the cooler master nova touch tkl utilizes genuine topper hybrid capacitive switches and is now available at a more affordable price click now to learn more good tech tips morning i love gmm but what we're here to talk today about is the myth of megahertz not the awesome antics of rhett and link so let's set the stage there are many things that will determine a processor's effective speed when handling tasks but two of the most common ones are clock speed which is a given and ipc also known as instructions per clock which you'll hear a lot when it's thrown around as the banner of ipc improvements with every new processor launch right about now is when i would get you guys to click on the box to go check out the fastest possible episode explaining ipc but we don't have one as of yet so what i would suggest is you check out the kind of somewhat rough wikipedia article on the topic and other various sources we'll try to get a video about that out fairly soon ipc isn't necessarily just as simple as it sounds at first but intel claims generation after generation to have a usually around 10 general improvement does this improvement actually amount to anything wouldn't an old processor running at 2.4 gigahertz run just as well as a new processor running at 2.4 gigahertz and even if the improvements do amount to something will this show up in non-real-world synthetic tests only or will it actually be noticed let's find out the tools of the trade for today will be two different test machines one will be linus's scrapyard wars machine you haven't seen scrapyard wars first of all i'm genuinely surprised and second of all click here or something and then come back later we will be using the q6600 that which is running in his system at 2.4 gigahertz rocking four standard cores and no hyper threading alongside eight gigabytes of ram and a freaking gtx 980 from gigabyte wind force just to push the gpu bottleneck out of the way and see how effective the processor actually is at handling things our second system will be the standard gpu test bench machine with its smugly running 5960x but today it won't be running normally i've nerfed the 5960x down to 2.4 gigahertz and four colors with no hyper threading to match the clock speed and core count of the q6600 if you're interested in how core count can affect things check out my recent video here on course for gaming then i slapped eight gigabytes of ram onto the bench and the same winforce gtx 980 to even things up in order to pit these two systems against each other i picked a suite of seven different benchmarks three different synthetics and four games i'll start off with a forum favorite and that would be cinebench r15 check out the awesome cinebench r15 thread and other rs actually on the fort as you can see there's been a whopping 55 improvement that's pretty huge even given the seven year gap between these two processors and with our new fancy new chip majorly nerfed just for this experiment 3dmark and 7-zip tests were fairly similar with the 5960x actually slapping around the old weary q6600 but none of this was all that surprising but it's time to move on to stuff that you're probably more interested real world gaming performance first up we have tomb raider which showed essentially no difference between the two i really need to stop using tomb raider for anything other than gpu tests because it really doesn't scale with anything other than gpus at all well that story was boring so moving on next up we have far cry 4 which as we know from the course for gaming video isn't all that cpu bound unless you count not running on dual cores but regardless we do see a bit of an improvement here and that's nothing to scoff at but this is where it starts getting interesting dying light fairly substantial difference in average fps between the q6600 dipping all the way down to 15 fps at times for minimums and the 5960x holding a cool 25 fps for minimums also note that whenever there was a slightly more intense zombie action going on it would chug a bit and even crashed a few times on the q 6600 not a great experience last of all and oh did i save the best for last is cities skylines we just recently introduced this game into our testing suite and damn does it love processors and it really shows here with the q6600 there were stutters all freaking over the place it couldn't run 4k and it was barely able to manage itself at 1080p and it was just a horrible experience meanwhile the 5960x was just chilling no big deal so in conclusion what does all this mean well i hope it helped the show how things can improve more drastically over time than most the easy to read specs actually show if you're already happy with your late gen processor you don't need to run out and replace it this second it doesn't matter there are always other things that you can do as well overclocking can help a ton and you can just not run all your games at max like we just did that can help too but if you are a speed freak and you've been struggling to figure out why your older overclocked processor isn't performing quite as well as your buddy's stock processor running at the same frequencies hopefully this will help speaking of better than dessert crunchyroll if you're a fan of anime and haven't signed up for crunchyroll premium yet you should certainly give them a shot crunchyroll is a site created by anime fans for the other anime fans they offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from japan like kuroko's basketball 3 and jojo's bizarre adventure as well as a large collection of the most popular anime shows like one piece and naruto all professionally subtitled if you head over to crunchyroll.com linus you can sign up for a 30-day free trial of crunchyroll premium which is completely ad-free and if you enjoy any benefits of premium like 1080p streaming getting new episodes of shows straight from japan within an hour of their premiere and being able to stream anywhere anytime from a variety of devices even your phone tablet or heck wii u you can continue your premium membership to crunchyroll for only 6.95 per month so head over to crunchyroll.com linus and check them out personally i'm quite a fan of my 5 gigahertz 2600k but it may be time to upgrade soon let me know what you think down in the comments down below or better yet over on the forums while you're here like dislike favorite subscribe share do all that kind of stuff check the link in the video description down below to get a cool linus media group shirt there's a bunch of really cool ones and i actually have been running into people wearing them at conventions lately which is pretty sick over on the forum you can check out the support linus media group link where you can do cool stuff like changing your amazon affiliate code to ours that gives us a small kickback whenever you buy things and actually adds up to being really really helpful also if you want to become a contributor on the forum you can get a really cool little badge under your profile picture whenever you post things thanks for watching guys and i'll see you next time\n"