The Sandy Bridge Upgrade Question

More comparative graphs between Sandy Bridge and Skylake:




With our graphs somewhat squished at the far end it's tricky to appreciate the differences but at stock speed the result is clear: the Core i7-6700K is significantly faster in every test - even games - than the Core i7-2600K. Here, the difference was between 10 and 15 percent, while there were even bigger differences in many of the 2D tests. For example in Cinebench R15 the difference was over 20 percent with similar results in the video editing and image editing tests.

The Core i7-2600K is of course a great overclocker, but you'll need to crank things up to at least 4.8GHz to get anywhere near the Core i7-6700K and for many tests, that's with the latter just at stock speed too. In Cinebench R15 and both of our game tests, this wasn't even enough to better the stock speed Core i7-6700K, although in some tests it saw limited gains from overlocking, especially in games. The thing to take away from this is that unless your core i7-2600K is massively overclocked, you'll be losing ground across the board - quite significantly in some cases. Furthermore, even if it is massively overclocked, the likelihood is it's only as fast as a stock speed Core i7-6700K, and for rendering purposes it may still be signficantly slower.