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 i5-3570K, with our "low-preset" is on average 0.7 percent faster than the Core i5-4670K. Switching to our "high-preset" shows that the Core i5-3570K's can maintain it's lead with 1.0 percent advantage. It's actually quite surprising for us to see that the old Ivy Bridge CPU is quicker at the same frequency than Haswell. Overclocking the Core i5-3570K to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by 11.4 percent but when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is only 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 3570K needed 27.3 percent more power and in case of the 4670K the increase was a whopping 47 percent.

Should you be thinking about upgrading your Core i5-3570K setup with a Core i5-4670K, we can tell you that this step can be skipped. It was really surprising to see that the old Ivy Bridge architecture was faster than new Haswell in our selection of games. Next to that, the performance increase remains consistent even if the clock speed is raised by 1 GHz, from 3.5 GHz to 4.5 GHz.

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