Conclusion

Last summer we published a similar series of articles, where we were analyzing gaming performance on the basis of two different processors. Back in the days it became very clear that performance differences between two CPU's at high resolutions are close to zero. The reason for this can be found within the fact, that the processor isn't the bottleneck of a system, when you're playing games at high resolutions. In this case it's the graphics card, which has to work overtime. In case of lower resolutions the influence of the processor becomes clearly visible, since the graphics card isn't the limiting factor anymore.

Having a closer look at the results we gathered while testing eight different games and two benchmarks with a low and a high quality preset, we see that the Core i5-2500K, with our "low-preset" is on average 8.8 percent slower than the Core i5-4670K. Switching to our "high-preset" shows that the Core i5-2500K is again slower by 1.9 percent. Overclocking the Core i5-2500K to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by 12.4 percent but when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is only 2.1 percent. Regarding the Core i5-4670K the situation is similar (10.9 percent "low-preset", 1.0 percent "high-preset"). What's quite interesting to see is how the wattage of our test system increased while maintaining 4.5 GHz stably. The 2500K needed 9.4 percent more power and in case of the 4670K the increase was a whopping 47 percent. We were really surprised to see that overclocking the 2500K by more than 30 percent only accounted for a 9.3 percent increase in power consumption of our testsystem. Such a low number is very unusual.

Should you be thinking about replacing your Core i5-2500K setup with a Core i5-4670K, we can tell you that this step can be skipped. Since power consumption doesn't go through the roof we would highly recommend to overclock your i5-2500K and live for another one or two years with a slightly higher power consumption.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Far Cry 3
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 12 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 3	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 14 - Performance Index
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2