Next up we have Dawn of War III and here the stock 2600K makes out quite poorly, dipping below 60fps. Interestingly, memory speed has no impact here either, not something I would have guessed to be honest. Evidently a big part of the issue here is clock speed as the 2600K saw a nice 28% boost in average frame rate and 26% for the 1% low once overclocked. It was still 23% slower than the overclocked 8700K but that’s the closest we’ve seen yet across our medium quality tests.
Increasing the visual quality settings with the high preset changed virtually nothing as we see almost the exact same frame rates and as a result the same margins.
Even with the maximum quality settings enabled we see almost no difference in frame rate from the medium quality settings. We’re obviously extremely CPU bound in this title.
That said, jumping to 1440p and now we’re both CPU and GPU bound depending on which configuration you look at. Even so, the overclocked 2600K was still 22% slower than the 8700K when comparing the 1% low results, but just 14% slower for the average frame rate thanks to the eighth-gen series being limited by the GTX 1080 Ti.
Wow, here’s another title where the stock 2600K looks painfully slow compared to more modern processors, even the 4770K is worlds faster. In fact, once again overclocking the 2600K to 4.8GHz isn’t even enough to see it overtake the stock 4770K. When overclocked, the 2600K is 28% slower than the 8700K.
Increasing the visual quality settings to very high reduced the 28% margin seen previously to ever so slightly to 25%.
With the ultra-quality settings enabled the 8700K and its eighth-generation cohorts slam into a GPU-based brickwall as they find themselves locked at an average of 90fps. This afforded the overclocked 2600K the opportunity to catch up it’s now just 13% slower.
That margin is reduced even further at 1440p and now the overclocked 2600K is just 3% slower as the games primary GPU bound at this point.
Moving on we have Dirt 4 and this time overclocking the 2600K to 4.8GHz was enough to nudge it ahead of the stock 4770K, albeit just ahead. This meant overclocked it was 27% slower than the overclocked 8700K.
Interestingly, increasing the quality preset sees the overclocked 2600K fall quite some distance behind the stock 4770K and as a result it’s now 31% slower than the overclocked 8700K. I’m not sure what went wrong for the 2600K here so let’s move on to the ultra quality preset to see what we find.
Here we see a similar situation and although the overclocked 2600K has managed to close in on the 8700K that’s only due to the fact that the eighth-gen processor has found the limits of the 1080 Ti. Notice how the 2600K is still quite a long way behind the 4770K – quite odd.
Even at 1440p, the overclocked 2600K trails the 4770K by quite a large margin despite nudging closer to the GPU bound 8700K. Still the 1% low result for the overclocked 2600K is surprisingly low, here it’s still 23% slower than the 4770K.
