2500K... 6 years ago! My, how time flies!

[mwforrest7]

Still using my 2500K in my gaming rig! I upgraded the GPU to a GTX 970 a couple years ago, and increased my RAM to 16GB, but otherwise its the same-ol machine as when I first bought the 2500K. I play on a 27inch 2K monitor and can still play all the games I care about at max or near max settings (Battlefield games, Overwatch, WoW, etc).

I am very happy with how long it has lasted me so far and I hope to squeeze another year or two out of this build. I am aiming to hold out until Star Citizen releases before making an entirely new rig. And also... hopefully the GPU shortage will be resolved by then.

 

[WildW]

Maybe it's down to this thread but after only recently saying I was still using a 2500K I crumbled yesterday and ordered an upgrade. My 2600k arrives tomorrow.

Edit: Received! Having fun dialing in an overclock. 4.4 at 1.275V was okay, 4.6 is needing a bump to 1.35 so far.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Since this is a nostalgia thread, here's a 2023 update

Chalk me up as a fan of the 2500K. I ended using that chip in my main machine for a full 10 years, until 2020.
And it's still dormant on a spare ITX 1155 motherboard, in storage.

 

[psolord]

Here's a 2023 update from me as well. Not dormant, not in storage and equipped with a current gen graphics card. Several runs I have done, on my hobbyist non monetized Youtube channel, paired with a rx6600.

https://www.youtube.com/@toutagamon/search?query=2500k%20rx6600

Yeah it's a stupid pairing (just for testing though), considering that the 6600 is an 8X lanes pcie 4.0 card and on the 2500k, it runs at pcie 2.0 speeds, but still it manages quite good playability. From what I see, the framedrops that occur, seem to be more a matter of lack of threads, than pcie bandwith. I think a 2600k would be fine, but that is a test for another time.

I mean look at Forza Horizon 5. I did a capped run there and it did a solid 60, at ultra preset mind you. And no pauses for loading during the scene changes, like gen 8 consoles do. So it essentially provides Gen 9 quality gaming on that. And yes, I will not eve

The uncapped Godfall, which was a shiny trinket during PS5's launch, runs at more than 60fps at epic preset.

Lies of P is super smooth and doesn't even have the PS5's framedrops, I kid you not.

Diablo IV runs at 80-120 fps at ultra and that was with the beta.

Spider Man Miles Morales is very playable with framedrops, but at very high, which is a higher preset than PS5.

Are you kidding me? We are talking about a cpu and overall platform, that existed three years inside PS3's life! Could anyone imagine back in January 2011, when the 2500k launched, that it would run something like Forza Horizon 5 at some point?

I sweat to god, if any cpu comes anywhere close to being this epic, this would be the 8600k, which I also have and that is mostly due to its strong cores and 5Ghz capability. I see the 8600k having 60fps capability, even three years inside the gen10 life.

 

[A///]

Were graphic cards ever saturating pcie2 bandwidth in the first place? maybe the higher end nvidia from last gen? I knew people rnning 3090s on their 2600k's. intel's good chip design and then lack of integrity and wit moving forth allowed these chips to remain very relevant and arguably stillr elevent outside trip a gaming today just ashow first gen intel i7 processors are still usefull today. amd not being relevant until mid 2017 and not being the tour de force intel needed up their swollen backside vis a vis a firm kick with a metal toe cap shoe with extended serrated spike knife to get them to move their heavy feet and pump out better products but alas intel was so far behind on r and d that their latest slew of processors haven't been very good apart from the heterogeneous design but even that seems to be hitting a wall if igor is to be believed.

 

[psolord]

The problem with the Sandies specifically, is that they are using the old 8b/10b encoding. This has serious overhead and valuable effective bandwidth is lost.

But yeah, even so, if the settings used are within reasonable limits and a lot of vram/ram data round trips can be avoided, it still works quite well, as shown above.

 

[aigomorla]

Good grief im not even going to get started on this, if your still using a a Sandy Bridge.

Can it even playback 4K without issues?
I remember back in the days when a Q6600 was just enough to playback 1080p.

Also id be scared of the board the Sandy Bridge was on. If it hasn't failed yet, its destined to from age.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Good grief im not even going to get started on this, if your still using a a Sandy Bridge.

Can it even playback 4K without issues?
I remember back in the days when a Q6600 was just enough to playback 1080p.

Also id be scared of the board the Sandy Bridge was on. If it hasn't failed yet, its destined to from age.

You made me curious. These are very good questions.

So I fired up my spare Windows 7 machine, built around a Xeon E3-1240 v2. Which is a Sandy Bridge chip, and pretty much the second-fastest CPU for that socket (after the i7-3770K).
And I played two 4K video files : "The Last Days" (a political drama from the 1990s, average bitrate 7000 kb/s) and "The Abyss" (an upscale of the Director's Cut encoded in HEVC, so no bitrate is shown, but it's about 6.5GB/hour). On a 4K display, running the native resolution at 60 Hz.

Both files played without hiccups in MPC-BE and VLC. Even when I disabled GPU hardware acceleration from the GTX970.

I'm pretty sure the 2500K would offer a similar experience.

*Edit* I also found this:

 

[A///]

video playback would prioritise dgpu over igpu anyway and has been the case forever. you'll see hiccups with old dgpus. that 970 is still a good relevant gpu.

 

[aigomorla]

video playback would prioritise dgpu over igpu anyway and has been the case forever. you'll see hiccups with old dgpus. that 970 is still a good relevant gpu.

thats if you had hardware transcoding.
Assuming you didn't, and was using something really old, like what typically people would use on a system this age, i figured it would be a valid question.

Im still laughing at these relics, not to insult anyone, but they are relics.
However working and effective relics.

 

[nOOky]

I use my old 2600k system for playing old games like Cod1 and Quake 3 when I feel like it. It handles many older games easily, and lately I haven't been playing anything new on my current gamer which is a whopping 6 years old now too ugh.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Where the 2500K and my FX 8350 fail miserably here today, past the midway point of 2023, is in load times and shader compilation. Even if you can lock the game to 45fps or something to smooth out frame pacing, Zen 5 will be here before the Last of Us is ready to play. 😂

 

[tcsenter]

Can it even playback 4K without issues?
I remember back in the days when a Q6600 was just enough to playback 1080p.

You mean playback 100% in CPU? Q6600 is more than enough to feed 1080p to any GPU for hardware decoding.

 

[A///]

thats if you had hardware transcoding.
Assuming you didn't, and was using something really old, like what typically people would use on a system this age, i figured it would be a valid question.

Im still laughing at these relics, not to insult anyone, but they are relics.
However working and effective relics.

but we know most people still running an enthusiast diy platform were running newer cards. seen some crazy dummies run 4090s on a 2600k.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

but we know most people still running an enthusiast diy platform were running newer cards. seen some crazy dummies run 4090s on a 2600k.

The min-max meme taken to the extreme.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

"Today, Sandy Bridge remains surprisingly usable, even if more modern CPUs beat it into the ground in head-to-head benchmarking. That’s because it does the important things right."

Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation

Processor companies typically iterate off proven designs, and for good reason. Changing too many things at once introduces a lot of risk. A lot of changing parts makes it hard to get a good picture…

chipsandcheese.com

 

[CakeMonster]

SB (at least the HT 2700K) is surprisingly usable still. But thankfully the biggest fanboys have calmed down. 2+ years ago people were bragging everywhere how everything newer was useless and how great it was running OC'ed. They had a point but there were some plainly wrong assumptions that were popular too, especially for gaming. Newer games and even older like WoW (in crowded areas) absolutely brought SB to its knees when the CPU got hammered.

 

[A///]

The min-max meme taken to the extreme.

missed this. yep. see it a lot actually with people in our age range or older. there's 2 extremes in the retired range and beyond. those who are like this who whine that their system is perfectly good and those who don't give a hoot and will splurge because their remaining time on earth is so precious why be a cheap skate? The amount of grown men and the occasional woman who are their mid 60s and beyond who game is higher than you would think. I think most don't say they're into the hobby to avoid judgement from other old farts their age.

 

[tcsenter]

I just gave away i7-3770, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, NV Quadro P600, running W10P. Most PC buyers are not gamers.

 

[SPBHM]

I was using my Sandy Bridge i5 until earlier this year, replaced with some cheapo haswell
if my sandy was an i7 I would likely still be using, but haswell seems a bit better on emulation maybe helped by avx2 which is nice,

and overclocked 2600k is probably still very nice to use,

 

[A///]

this thread reminded me of one fateful week in 2008 when I was using a very old pentium 2 or 3 maybe pentium 3 with xp installed on a drive slower than 5200 rpm. don't remember. did not have wifi on it. had to use one of them usb wifi dongles or it did have wifi but kept cutting out which seems likely because I bought the damn dongle for $20 which helped with the cutting out but not the slow speeds. my lord was that a slow laptop or what. it would take ages to open up a browser window and constantly speed its fans up to keep cool. At the time my computer was out of action due to a faulty part I'd sent in for warranty exchange. after about 9 days of suffering I accidentally dropped the old laptop from 40 feet down the main walkway of that house I was residing in, took a drive to the closest apple store and picked up a laptop from them. I didn't want to muck around with any windows laptop at the time. good memories. Who knew a plastic frames laptop could skip so much when thrown with enough sheer force?

looking back i could have invented a new casual sport.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I think most don't say they're into the hobby to avoid judgement from other old farts their age.

It's a hobby. If it gives people satisfaction, then I'm not going to pass judgment on anyone. If only more would avoid doing that.

Whether that involves computers, cars, boats, flying trapezes or whatever.

this thread reminded me of one fateful week in 2008 when I was using a very old pentium 2 or 3 maybe pentium 3 with xp installed on a drive slower than 5200 rpm. don't remember. did not have wifi on it. had to use one of them usb wifi dongles or it did have wifi but kept cutting out which seems likely because I bought the damn dongle for $20 which helped with the cutting out but not the slow speeds. my lord was that a slow laptop or what. it would take ages to open up a browser window and constantly speed its fans up to keep cool. At the time my computer was out of action due to a faulty part I'd sent in for warranty exchange. after about 9 days of suffering I accidentally dropped the old laptop from 40 feet down the main walkway of that house I was residing in, took a drive to the closest apple store and picked up a laptop from them. I didn't want to muck around with any windows laptop at the time. good memories. Who knew a plastic frames laptop could skip so much when thrown with enough sheer force?

looking back i could have invented a new casual sport.

Could it have been a 4200RPM drive? Those things were slower then frozen molasses. Couple with too little RAM, and you could literally make and eat breakfast, and read the newspaper before that thing was booted.

My personal record was a Pentium 3 (1GHz?) which took something like 30 minutes to boot and get to the Windows desktop.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I think most don't say they're into the hobby to avoid judgement from other old farts their age.

Agree. If something has given you enjoyment in your younger years, you are likely to fire up the same experience from time to time, to relive your youth. Being unable to do so would be very sad.

 

[tcsenter]

I just gave away i7-3770, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, NV Quadro P600, running W10P. Most PC buyers are not gamers.

Forget to mention, it replaced C2D E8500, 4GB RAM, 160GB spinner, Radeon HD 6450 running W32 I put together ~9 years ago reusing Optiplex 755. They use it all that time with basically no hardware or OS troubles (other than PEBKAC). Mui bueno upgrade.

 

[A///]

It's a hobby. If it gives people satisfaction, then I'm not going to pass judgment on anyone. If only more would avoid doing that.

Whether that involves computers, cars, boats, flying trapezes or whatever.



Could it have been a 4200RPM drive? Those things were slower then frozen molasses. Couple with too little RAM, and you could literally make and eat breakfast, and read the newspaper before that thing was booted.

My personal record was a Pentium 3 (1GHz?) which took something like 30 minutes to boot and get to the Windows desktop.

your speaking to the choir. i think most older people say in their mid 60s and above are careful about revealing their hobbies to their peers because retirement communities are too similar to a public school environment. one slip up and you won't be getting any tail for years.