Today nosotros're dusting off our former Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K test system and pairing it up with a GTX 1080 Ti to see how well the seven-year-old processor holds upwardly in the latest and greatest PC games compared to Intel's new Cadre i7-8700K. We know that the 2600K still has some fight left in it, just next year could finally be fourth dimension for those equipped with the aging quad-core to brand their long-awaited upgrade.

By the stop of 2022, the GTX 1080 Ti is likely to be ousted past an even faster flagship GPU and as a result mid-range GPUs are expected to be speedie as well, which is likely to require more processing power than the 2600K tin provide.

For today'southward testing nosotros take nigh a dozen titles on mitt for benching the 2600K and we tested each game using iii different quality presets. The focus will exist on the 1080p resolution simply we also have some 1440p results as well, though of form these are more than GPU bound but many of you seem interested in those figures so I've included them.

Last month we tested the fourth-generation Core i7-4770K under the same exam conditions and establish it was still hanging in in that location remarkably well, even with the mighty GTX 1080 Ti.

Tin Intel's much older 2nd-gen 2600K prove just as impressive? Let'south jump into the benchmarks to find out…

Showtime up nosotros have Ashes of the Singularity and out of the box the 2600K delivered a 69fps minimum and 77fps boilerplate, making it a little over 40% slower than the 8700K. Surprisingly, overclocking the 2600K to four.8GHz only placed it on par with the stock 4770K and while it did allow for very playable functioning it was withal around thirty% slower than the 8700K.

Increasing the visual quality settings with the extreme preset didn't change much, here the 2600K was 28% slower than the 8700K, so it still trailed past a rather large margin.

Using the crazy preset nosotros're by and large GPU bound though out of the box the 2600K takes a beating for the average frame charge per unit. Overclocked operation was additional by 22% to 88fps and now the 2600K is only around 9% slower than the majority of the 7th and eighth-gen CPUs.

The finally the last Ashes of the Singularity test was conducted at 1440p and hither the margins shut upwards a little more but even once overclocked the 2600K was around six% slower than the more modernistic Intel processors.

Next upwards we accept Battlefield 1 and boy has the Cadre i7-2600K anile in this one, at least when using medium quality settings at 1080p with a mighty powerful graphics card. Under those conditions it looks pretty slow, but then it is seven years onetime now so that in mind it'due south bloody impressive really. Anyway, hither it was again, roughly 40% slower than the 8700K and even overclocked struggles to match the stock 4770K.

Increasing the visual quality settings with the loftier preset doesn't change much, the 2600K is all the same near 40% slower than the 8700K and once overclocked again falls merely short of the stock 4770K which was the about surprising result for me.

Fifty-fifty with the ultra quality settings enabled, the 2600K still gets trampled -- here it was 35% slower than the stock 8700K. With both CPUs overclocked the margin is reduced to 22% for the average though I should note the 8700K is GPU limited in this test. The 1% low outcome is a better indicator of true performance and here the 2600K was 34% slower.

It's worth pointing out though that most GTX 1080 Ti owners probably aren't interested in playing Battlefield 1 at such a low resolution -- 1440p seems more than appropriate. Hither we're fifty-fifty more than GPU express and equally a result the 2600K was but ix% slower than the 8700K when comparison the average frame charge per unit one time both CPUs were overclocked. Of course it'southward the i% low that nosotros should really focus on and in BF1 the 2600K was still 21% slower, which is certainly a noteworthy deficit.