Conclusion

In the past few months we have published a lot of these CPU gaming performance articles. So far we've always compared two models with one another to give direct advice if an upgrade would be worth your money or not. Since quite a few readers have been asking to compare Haswell, Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge in one article, well here it is. This following conclusion will shed even more light on the fact, that the CPU really isn't the most important component in your system regarding gaming performance, especially when you already own a decent quad core part like the 2500K.

Especially when the graphics card is the bottleneck in your setup, performance differences are virtually inexistent and when even overclocking all CPUs to a whopping 4.5 GHz doesn't change anything on these results, then it can be considered as proven, that the CPU is really not crucial in a gaming setup. As long as a graphics card, when dealing with high resolutions, can account quickly for a 20 to 50 percent performance bump at high-resolutions, then the single digit change you get by swapping CPUs doesn't matter at all. If you only use your computer for gaming, then buying always the latest CPU is a waste of money. Apparently when reducing resolutions drastically, or in other words opening the bottleneck of the VGA, then you clearly see that there have actually been improvements made. Never the less it was rather interesting to see, that it isn't the 4670K, which, at stock clocks and even overclocked, isn't the quickest out of the three CPUs we tested. It's actually the 3570K which is able to outperform the 2500K by almost 10.5 percent and the 4670K by a mere 0.6 percent.

The entire story, or recommending an upgrade, gets even tougher and weirder when considering the power consumption. At stock clocks the Core i5-4670K is the most efficient CPU. Equipped with this CPU our test system pulls 106 Watt out of the wall, followed by the Core i5-3570K with 107 Watt and then there comes the Core i5-2500K with 120 Watt. This is the case, when we run wPrime, but when we put maximum load on the CPU using LinX the ranking looks like the following: the Core i5-3570K is in the lead with 116 Watt, then there is the Core i5-4760K with 128 Watt and at last there comes the i5-2500K with 135 Watt. And it's like that hasn't been confusing enough, when considering power consumption when the CPUs are overclocked, then the Core i5-2500K is becoming more efficient. So overall if we consider power consumption of all CPUs at stock frequencies as well as overclocked to 4.5 GHz, the Core i5-3570K seems like the overall smartest choice, since it's a bit faster than the 2500K and it draws quite a bit less power than the 4670K.

[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