2600k to 7700k, upgrade time!

Monday I will be installing a few new parts to bump me up 6 years into the present day. My 2600k was a wonderful chip, never stayed on a CPU that long before.

OLD 2011 parts :
i7 2600k @ 4.5 Ghz ||| CM Hyper 212+
Asus p8p67 Pro and 16GB Corsair XMS DDR3 1600

New 2017 parts:
i7 7700k @ 4.5 Ghz ||| CM Hyper 212 EVO
ASRock Z270 TAICHI and 32GB G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3200

Pretty excited to see the performance improvements that the new Z270 chipset and DDR4 speeds offer in addition to the CPU upgrade.

I updated my signature with the final build, I've been using the SSDs I installed in 2014 and this past fall got the GTX1080, which seems CPU limited whenever I try to game at 4k.

Also haven't been super active here in a few years, so I had to get my email and pw reset, but I am back!

Yeah, you would need two GTX 1080's in SLI to game satisfactorily at 4k, especially one that big. Or there are some more potent cards from both Nvidia and AMD to be released soon that should do it with a single card.

I've found the gtx1080 is fine for Rocket League and Civ 6 at 4k.

Overall the new cpu is fantastic, and a overall this was a huge upgrade when considering all parts.

Welcome back to the forum, by the way! Glad it turns out that the games you play are served adequately with one gtx 1080 and that the other component upgrades did the trick.

Nice to hear. Most still argue you don't need to upgrade from a 2600k to anything current gen. But realistically there's still benefits to be had. Primarily chipset benefits (USB 3.1, Type C, PCIE NVME, etc etc) but you still get a reasonable jump in performance from Sandy to Skylake/Kaby IMO. If you were on Haswell I'd say no point, though.

Glad to hear everything went so smoothly. It certainly must look good with the Taichi. Do you have any pictures?

Woomack is thinking that the Z270 motherboard's memory controllers are overclocking better than Z170. Are you planning on overclocking at all? (Not that you need to, but this is O/C forums.)

I have found that Dishonored is not 4k friendly, so I've been playing that at 1080p upscaled, which looks fine thanks to the decent upscaler in the Sony TV along with its forgiving art style.

Battleborn runs fine at 4k as does Darkest Dungeon, and Witcher 3 (minus the hair works).

The z270 Taichi is a really nice board, I'll take a few pictures over the weekend. I don't care about the RGB lighting as a I have a case with no window. OLD SCHOOL.

The worst part of putting it all together was once I had it all screwed down and everything installed. I go to plug in the power and usb cables on the back, and I noticed I forgot to install the motherboard back cover plate. Luckily once I unscrewed the mobo, I was able to slide it forward about an inch and got the back cover plate where it belonged.

I might OC it to see if/how long it can stay stable at 5ghz, but I am on AIR (so heat will be an issue) and the overall benefits don't seem that huge.

I don't have any benching software anymore, I think I had 3D mark ages ago. Anyway I saw CPU-z had a benching button so I gave that a shot before and after the upgrade, the 6700k was the baseline I picked, as it was the best offered.

2600k stock speeds


7700k stock speeds


One other thing I noticed, the CM 212 EVO, once fully tightened down on the CPU still has a bit of wiggle to it. I googled a bit and it seems that is normal?

Concerning the "wiggle" with the cooler, have you done any temp monitoring? That cooler doesn't have the most user friendly mounting mechanism I have ever seen.

Congrats , nice upgrade

trents said:

Concerning the "wiggle" with the cooler, have you done any temp monitoring? That cooler doesn't have the most user friendly mounting mechanism I have ever seen.

Click to expand...

I haven't seen the CPU go above 63c when playing Witcher 3. At idle its running 31c.

Sheesh those numbers make me sad looking at my little 8320
I had to bump her back down to 4.4 because of bluescreens when playing GTAV@ 4k
I had noticable frame increase at 4.7 but it wasnt worth the trouble

I am however happy to see it's multithread is nearly identical @98%

And..... my 2 week old CM Hyper 212 EVO fan is now making a nasty grinding noise on any setting above silent. Wonderful...

Off to newegg I go for an exchange.

The GTX1080 is 4K limited. If you were running with 1440p the card would do a lot better.

from a 2500k(my old pc)

to my 6700k, It is by LARGE margins faster.

I'm seeing a 68% single thread performance jump

and multi thread is ridiculous, from "433%" to "722%"

Obviously HT isnt a thing on 2500k, but the single thread performance boost is significant.

I can't compare to a 2600k for some reason, nor a 7700k

Compared to your results, I scored 2206 single thread

9505 multi thread

This is Oc'd at 4.4 ghz.(4.393-396 to be accurate)