Win 11 performance on a i7 2600k (equiv to a 6th gen intel)

I installed 11 (bypassed TPM etc) on my old i7 2600k with 16GB and it ran as fast as my 13th gen PC. (12th gen)

Memory usage with one browser with 5 tabs and an office app (WPS office) was ~4GB!!!

All apps launched within 1 or 2 seconds and there was no lag switching between them. Web pages like CNN rendered with in 1-2 seconds

martik777 said:

I installed 11 (bypassed TPM etc) on my old i7 2600k with 16GB and it ran as fast as my 13th gen PC.

Memory usage with one browser with 5 tabs and an office app (WPS office) was ~4GB!!!

All apps launched within 1 or 2 seconds and there was no lag switching between them. Web pages like CNN rendered with in 1-2 seconds

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The 2500K and the 2600K were... still are, awesome processors. ^^

What's the CPU in your "13th gen PC"? The processor in your "My Computer" is Gen12.

The I7-2600k (4 cores, 8 threads, 3.4/3.8GHz) isn't terrible compared to low-end Gen13 Core CPUs. Like an I3-13100 (4 cores, no hyperthreading, 3.4/4.5GHz).

bobkn said:

What's the CPU in your "13th gen PC"? The processor in your "My Computer" is Gen12.

The I7-2600k (4 cores, 8 threads, 3.4/3.8GHz) isn't terrible compared to low-end Gen13 Core CPUs. Like an I3-13100 (4 cores, no hyperthreading, 3.4/4.5GHz).

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i3 12100f corrected post to 12th gen :)

martik777 said:

i3 12100f corrected post to 12th gen :)

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Which is very similar to an I3-13100.

bobkn said:

Which is very similar to an I3-13100.

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~10 years ago my son spent a small fortune on a i7 4790K. Never thought a lowly i3 would be 2x a fast a few years later for a fraction of the price!

All of the 12-13th gen have very similar single thread ratings (~3500-4400). The vast majority of work is done with these 4 cores at that single thread speed.
Higher end i5/i7's you pay for more cores which most people never use

Depending upon what you are doing, processor performance alone can be misleading. Processor CAPABILITIES can be just as important.

@martik777, you have noted the i7-4790K. Great CPU. I was using a system based upon that system up until about a month ago. Originally it was my primary desktop PC until I replaced it with an 11th gen i7 system, and the 4th gen then became my Plex server.

Here's where it gets interesting: I just replace that 4th gen system with a lowly Intel N95 based Mini PC system. For those not familiar, the N95 is basically the replacement for what was known as the Celeron and Pentium processors. This Mini PC draws so little power, that the power supply is just a 30-watt wall wart, and that leaves enough overhead to power external drives, etc.

How can such a low power CPU replace a desktop i7 CPU? Simple: Intel QuickSync Video. This is what I meant by capabilities. For particular purpose, serving video as a Plex server, current generations of CPUs with QuickSync is amazing. It can do all the video transcoding in hardware while even this lowly CPU remains in single digit CPU utilization.

So, what I'm trying to say, is that for some applications, advancements in the CPU or the supporting chipsets, can be every bit as important as raw CPU power. Aside from QuickSync video to do video heavy-lifting in hardware, maybe you want to do things like support a very large number of SATA ports for lots of storage devices, or maybe you need a lot of PCIe lanes. All these are things that don't require much in the way of CPU power just by themselves. So, take these into consideration when deciding what kind of CPU to use. In my case, I was able to replace my entire large 4th gen tower PC with a PC that cost me about $149 and that includes CPU, RAM - everything. Only exception was my external storage for all my media (40 TB) which cost many times the price of the PC

40TB!!! How do you connect all that to a N95 mini?
I run my plex server off (3TB) my main PC which has it's drawbacks. The N95 seems like an efficient solution. I didn't know they had Quicksync on board.
How do you move video files to the N95 server? I'm assuming you download on a different computer. Do you have a monitor attached to it or control remotely?

This may be a solution for a low end build Im working on for a friend too. All he does is browsing and office.

martik777 said:

How do you move video files to the N95 server? I'm assuming you download on a different computer. Do you have a monitor attached to it or control remotely?

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He said,
Only exception was my external storage for all my media (40 TB) which cost many times the price of the PC

So, I think he connected the 40TB of external storage to the mini-PC.

pparks1 said:

So, I think he connected the 40TB of external storage to the mini-PC.

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Precisely correct. It's a simple USB, multi-bay disk enclosure so it requires just one USB connection. As for moving data onto it, I can simply plug that same enclosure into any machine, but I typically just use the network. The Mini PC has 2 gigabit Ethernet connections. With both connected to my 2.5 gigabit switch I can get better than 200MB / second to an SSD cache (just a second SSD installed in the Mini PC) which then distributes it to the drives in the enclosure

martik777 said:

Higher end i5/i7's you pay for more cores which most people never use

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Amen to that. But it goes both ways. Many people have no clue what they are buying because they have no clue about hardware. They look at nothing but cheap price and buy pieces of crap with too little ram or slow cpus. Those on the other end of the spectrum pay too much for hardware their computing needs will never utilize.

In my case,I could just as easily operate on 6 less cores than what I have. The only time this machine has hyper-threaded was when I stress tested it. I knew when I purchased it that it was too much machine but the deal was too good to pass up. I did have some issues but eventually worked them out with the OEM under warranty. I bought with the intention of reselling but I was in heaven when I fired it up the first time. I'd never had a new machine before nor one of this quality. Naturally, I didn't make that profit I was expecting from a resell. I figure it will carry me through Windows 12 which will last as long as I live or until I'm totally senile. I do wish it wasn't so power hungry, though.

But my favorite computer ever is my computer#2 which didn't have compatible hardware for 11. I bought it used 8 years ago. Like @hsehestedt I made it my media server for Plex movies and a huge library of music I'd collectd over the best 40 years of my life. I think that old i7-4770 will run forever as long as I slap new thermal paste on it every couple of years.

And heres me feeling my 10700k's aging and not keeping up LOL. Awesome to get so long outta one! a new gen i5 eats me for breakfast.

glasskuter said:

Amen to that. But it goes both ways. Many people have no clue what they are buying because they have no clue about hardware. They look at nothing but cheap price and buy pieces of crap with too little ram or slow cpus. Those on the other end of the spectrum pay too much for hardware their computing needs will never utilize.

In my case,I could just as easily operate on 6 less cores than what I have. The only time this machine has hyper-threaded was when I stress tested it. I knew when I purchased it that it was too much machine but the deal was too good to pass up. I did have some issues but eventually worked them out with the OEM under warranty. I bought with the intention of reselling but I was in heaven when I fired it up the first time. I'd never had a new machine before nor one of this quality. Naturally, I didn't make that profit I was expecting from a resell. I figure it will carry me through Windows 12 which will last as long as I live or until I'm totally senile. I do wish it wasn't so power hungry, though.

But my favorite computer ever is my computer#2 which didn't have compatible hardware for 11. I bought it used 8 years ago. Like @hsehestedt I made it my media server for Plex movies and a huge library of music I'd collectd over the best 40 years of my life. I think that old i7-4770 will run forever as long as I slap new thermal paste on it every couple of years.

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My hardware days go back to living room sized mainframes with 96k core memory and cpu cycles counted in MILLISECS . We used to slam the lids down on the memory modules when we got parity errors. These modules were 3x the size of a washing machine.

I've sure that i9-10900 is massive overkill. It's funny, the low end i3 12100 has a much faster single thread speed and almost the same CPU mark rating. I once wrote a script to sound an alarm every time the cpu went over 50% or so. I might have heard it once a day.

BTW, you can easily install windows 11 on that old i7 4770 by disabling TMP etc. I installed it on my old i7 2600k no problem.

glasskuter said:

(snip)

In my case,I could just as easily operate on 6 less cores than what I have.

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From a birthday card I received last year:



(In case it's not obvious, this is not intended as a petty criticism of grammar or syntax. Only a real jerk would do that. That could be me, on one of my worst days.)

ShamrockRig said:

And heres me feeling my 10700k's aging and ndasasdasot keeping up LOL. Awesome to get so long outta one! a new gen i5 eats me for breakfast.You wou;dn't notice any difference with a

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ShamrockRig said:

And heres me feeling my 10700k's aging and not keeping up LOL. Awesome to get so long outta one! a new gen i5 eats me for breakfast.

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I doubt you would even notice a difference with an i5 13600k unless you were encoding.

martik777 said:

I doubt you would even notice a difference with an i5 13600k unless you were encoding.

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Any CPU with the QuickSync video would be roughly the same speed encoding. I just did 85 episodes of a TV show today, decoding and re-encoding to 1080P HEVC in part of one day, averaging over 250 fps on my little N95 CPU. CPU usage remained in single digit percentages most of the time with short excursions higher.