I am planning to (in about a month) build myself a computer for gaming, solidworks and matlab, and I will probably not OC past what I can do without changing voltages. It is clear that for gaming the i5-2500 (or k version) is the best performance for the price, but I wanted to figure out if the i7-2600 had anything substantial to offer for solidworks or matlab. I haven't found a good source of matlab's benchmark results yet (only this article http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/newsreader/view_thread/296005) so this thread will be about the solidworks benchmarks.
A searchable list of solidworks benchmarks results can be found here:
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/shareyourscore.htm
I have organized them by processor and made some graphs showing results.
All scores are in seconds (lower is better).
The markers correspond to average scores.
The error bars with end caps are one standard deviation from average.
The error bars without end caps are max and min scores.
Each graph is labeled by what the solidworks website called the benchmark.
I expected to see (especially on the cpu scores) tighter groupings for the non-K version of each CPU in all of these benchmarks, as varying amounts of overclocking on the K versions should spread out those results. However, this only really happened on the "Render" benchmark. However, I was surprised by how tight groupings were on the 2500K, not even overlaping 2500 results on "CPU" or "I/O".
In cases where the averages are far apart the 2500K wins over the 2500 by amounts that don't seem reasonable (unless everyone OC'd the crap out of their 2500K). If I didn't realize the K version of each chip was so similar to the normal version, these results would lead me to buy the i5-2500K, but those differences do not seem reasonable, so I figured I should look for an explanation. Also the 2600K has an extremely large spread in all results.
Maybe better results came from computers in which better parts went in overall. I don't have very much information about the computers these cpu's were in, or how much OC'ing was done, so the best I can really do is a histogram of GPU's based on price (widely varying ages and some being professional made comparing benchmarks unreasonable).
I'm going to assume that more expensive GPU's not only would do better against cheaper GPU's but also correspond to the other parts of the computer being better.
A price of 0 means something like "VNC Mirror Driver" was written in the GPU column.
With the exception of the 2500 (non K) all histograms are scaled to have the same total area filled in with bars, so height corresponds to percent in a comparable sense.
Here are the histograms:
Note that for the i7-2600K the expensive graphics card, the ATI FirePro V7800 (FireGL) corresponded to the best results where on the i5-2500K it corresponded to very mixed results (even though the guy who used it in the 2500K was kind enough to write in that he OC'd his to 4.6 GHz.
These histograms do seem like enough to imply that the 2500K's were on average put into better computer's than the 2500 and explain the huge differences in benchmarks. They also explain the large spreads on the 2600K benchmarks.
It looks like on average the 2600 (k or not) isn't better by enough to buy it and large spreads from average seem to be explained by GPU.
I'd be interested in hearing more ways of interpreting these results as well as opinions on whether the 2600 has anything to offer.
A searchable list of solidworks benchmarks results can be found here:
http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/shareyourscore.htm
I have organized them by processor and made some graphs showing results.
All scores are in seconds (lower is better).
The markers correspond to average scores.
The error bars with end caps are one standard deviation from average.
The error bars without end caps are max and min scores.
Each graph is labeled by what the solidworks website called the benchmark.
I expected to see (especially on the cpu scores) tighter groupings for the non-K version of each CPU in all of these benchmarks, as varying amounts of overclocking on the K versions should spread out those results. However, this only really happened on the "Render" benchmark. However, I was surprised by how tight groupings were on the 2500K, not even overlaping 2500 results on "CPU" or "I/O".
In cases where the averages are far apart the 2500K wins over the 2500 by amounts that don't seem reasonable (unless everyone OC'd the crap out of their 2500K). If I didn't realize the K version of each chip was so similar to the normal version, these results would lead me to buy the i5-2500K, but those differences do not seem reasonable, so I figured I should look for an explanation. Also the 2600K has an extremely large spread in all results.
Maybe better results came from computers in which better parts went in overall. I don't have very much information about the computers these cpu's were in, or how much OC'ing was done, so the best I can really do is a histogram of GPU's based on price (widely varying ages and some being professional made comparing benchmarks unreasonable).
I'm going to assume that more expensive GPU's not only would do better against cheaper GPU's but also correspond to the other parts of the computer being better.
A price of 0 means something like "VNC Mirror Driver" was written in the GPU column.
With the exception of the 2500 (non K) all histograms are scaled to have the same total area filled in with bars, so height corresponds to percent in a comparable sense.
Here are the histograms:
Note that for the i7-2600K the expensive graphics card, the ATI FirePro V7800 (FireGL) corresponded to the best results where on the i5-2500K it corresponded to very mixed results (even though the guy who used it in the 2500K was kind enough to write in that he OC'd his to 4.6 GHz.
These histograms do seem like enough to imply that the 2500K's were on average put into better computer's than the 2500 and explain the huge differences in benchmarks. They also explain the large spreads on the 2600K benchmarks.
It looks like on average the 2600 (k or not) isn't better by enough to buy it and large spreads from average seem to be explained by GPU.
I'd be interested in hearing more ways of interpreting these results as well as opinions on whether the 2600 has anything to offer.
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