Conclusion

When set to work with its reference clock and at low resolution, the Core i5-2500K is around 10 percent slower on average when compared to the Core i5-3570K while at the high resolution the Core i5-3570K gain melts down to an average of 3 percent.

When overclocked to 4.5GHz, the Core i5-2500K is around 13 percent faster that stock one and around 3 percent faster than the Core i5-3570K at reference clock and at low graphics settings, while at high graphics settings that gain melts down to 2 percent against stock clocked Core i5-2500K and down to almost nothing when compared to the Core i5-3570K.

When taking look at the Core i5-3570K overclocked to 4.5GHz and compared to itself at stock frequency, it is 10 percent faster at low graphics settings and gives out almost identical performance at high graphics settings, showing that it is quite important to have a better GPU rather than to overclock the Core i5-3570K.

When both CPUs are overclocked to 4.5GHz, there is almost no performance gain at high graphics settings and a minor 7 percent difference at low graphics settings.

As far as the power consumption goes, both CPUs share the same power consumption in idle while at stock frequencies under load, the power consumption is anywhere between 12 and 16 percent higher on the Core i5-2500K. Overclocking is a whole different story as when overclocked, the Core i5-3570K tends to draw a lot more power ending up with 24 to 30 percent more, while the Core i5-2500K is a bit better as the power consumption goes up by 9 to 14 percent.

The price of both the Core i5-2500K and the Core i5-3570K is pretty much the same and according to these results, it only makes sense to upgrade to the Core i5-3570K if you are coming from older generation than the Core i5-2500K as the Core i5-3570K has better power consumption, better overall performance and all at the same price.

In case you are currently running the Core i5-2500K, there is simply no need to upgrade to the Core i5-3570K as you will end up with a pretty much identical CPU and will not see any performance gains unless you plan to play the games at low resolution and low graphics settings. At high graphics settings, both the Core i5-2500K and the Core i5-3570K do a great job and are not the bottleneck, so investing in a better GPU is a much better way to go.

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