There's an age-old question that gets asked all the time. Are all mehz the
same? Let's talk about that.
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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 uh 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 GHz run just as well as a
new processor running at 2.4 gig gigahertz? And even if the improvements
do amount to something, will this show up in non-realworld 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 Lionus' 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 GHz rocking four standard cores and no
hyperthreading alongside 8 GB of RAM and a freaking GTX 980 from uh Gigabyte
Windforce 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 smuggly running 5960X, but
today it won't be running normally. I've nerfed the 5960X down to 2.4 GHz and
four cores with no hyperthreading 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 cores for gaming. Then I slapped 8 GB of RAM onto
the bench and the same Windforce 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 up with a forum
favorite, and that would be Cinebench R15. Check out the awesome Cinebench R15
thread and other RS actually on the forum. As you can see, there's been a
whopping 55% improvement. That's pretty
huge, even given the 7-year gap between these two processors. And with our new
fancy new chip majorly nerfed just for
this experiment. 3D Mark and 7zip 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 CPUbound, 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 Q6600. Not a great experience.
Last of all, and oh did I save the best for last, is City's 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 to show how
things can improve more drastically over time than most the easyto 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. That's 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 Nudo, 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 adfree. And if you enjoy many 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 GHz 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 when you 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.