Intel Core I7-5775C Desktop Broadwell With Iris Pro 6200 Graphics Tested

bigwophh writes: 14nm Broadwell processors weren't originally destined for the channel, but Intel ultimately changed course and launched a handful of 5th Generation Core processors based on the microarchitecture recently, the most powerful of which is the Core i7-5775C. Unlike all of the mobile Broadwell processors that came before it, the Core i7-5775C is a socketed, LGA processor for desktops, just like 4th Generation Core processors based on Haswell. In fact, it'll work in the very same 9-Series chipset motherboards currently available (after a BIOS update). The Core i7-5775C, however, features a 128MB eDRAM cache and integrated Iris Pro 6200 series graphics, which can boost graphics performance significantly. Testing shows that the Core i7-5775C's lower CPU core clocks limit its performance versus Haswell, but its Iris Pro graphics engine is clearly more powerful.

Comments

The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article "The Core i7-5775C offers fairly strong performance, though it can't match higher-clocked--and lower priced--processors like the Core i7-4790K in general compute performance". It costs over 540$.

I do not want new and improved somewhat tolerable intel graphics: I want good graphics, and being able to upgrade them independently from the CPU is nice too.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Rockoon]

For all intents and purposes the "pro" part of Iris (bolting on EDRAM to the chip) does allow the GPU to do good graphics. It just isnt cost-competitive to buy a "pro" instead of buying a regular cpu with a discrete gpu card. These iris pro's are truly a ripoff.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

So get a cheaper 4th Gen Core i whatever. Or go with an AMD APU or CPU and get a discrete GPU in the mean time.

Intel Iris Pro graphics might not be great for gaming, but it sure will help with various GPU accelerated tasks like compositing and so forth in non-gaming uses.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd settle for a CPU that is faster than the last generation. Intel is throwing away CPU performance to compete on graphics and power consumption. For the ultrabook and tablet market, this is a good move but for desktops and high end laptops, it is a horrible idea. Some of us actually need more CPU and less GPU. For those of you who think the GPU counts, try implementing OpenCL on an open source operating system.

After reading this review, I'm sticking with my Core i7-4770. It's 1.5 years later and Intel only has a few products that beat it and they're all more expensive.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Jane Q. Public]

So get a cheaper 4th Gen Core i whatever. Or go with an AMD APU or CPU and get a discrete GPU in the mean time.

I think you missed the point. GP expressed a wish for a 5-gen chip with more cores, and no graphics.

There's a lot to be said for that.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Moof123]

The point is that half the die area (plus the extra DRAM module) cost you major $$$ even if all you wanted was a top end 4 core processor. For quite a while now Intel has been working on the graphics and power consumption, which is great for mobile and low-end, but the higher end desktop folks are getting frustrated that performance is dead flat, if not dropping.

Anyone paying $300-540 for a processor is not likely to cheap out and ONLY use the integrated graphics. These i5 and i7 processors are turning into a pretty big disappointment. You can get far better graphics with just about the lowliest available sub $100 graphics card, but the options ditch the graphics and get a couple more cores explode in price.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Blaskowicz]

Many just want some PC to do audio, photo or video, or perhaps some other uses while still running "light" games (be it any blizzard or valve ones, or some stuff where being compatible and not CPU/RAM starved is well good enough)

Within some parameters (perhaps moreso with i5 5675C), the CPU has its merits. No need to spend cash, size and weight on PSU and cooling either. Yes you can buy a 125W CPU and a 200W graphics card instead (going to the other extreme)
The elephant in the room is a $40 Celeron or a $50 AMD are über powerful for most people that don't run Crysis or video editing.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Smauler]

do not want new and improved somewhat tolerable intel graphics

This this and more this. Intel graphics are pretty much diabolical everywhere, In every situation.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy an AMD APU with HSA and an AMD graphics card with GCN cores, let the HSA runtime scheduler decide which computations to run on the APU and which to run on the GPU.

Or buy an AMD CPU with 6 or 8 cores (3 or 4 modules; cores on the same module can't issue 256-bit vector instructions at the same time) and a GPU for less than this processor. Check cpubenchmark.net for which CPU to buy.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt there will be any, as Skylake is just around the corner. Just get the 6-gen big core no GPU chip instead.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Damarkus13]

Yeah, integrated graphics on an i7 seems silly. Now, bolt an Iris Pro GPU onto an i3 NUC and I've found my next HTPC.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[alvinrod]

The E series (6 core, no graphics) tends to trail the regular release by almost a year. The 6-core Haswell chips just came out last September, whereas Haswell launched in the summer of 2013. We probably won't see the first 14 nm 6-core parts until Broadwell comes out. Anyone who's looking to buy high-end Intel CPUs is probably well aware of this.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[rrohbeck]

Yup, imagine how easily another four cores would fit in there.
However that would compete with Xeons. Can't have that, it's where the money is.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[MrDoh!]

Totally. I'll be running Titan X on my gaming rig, but a small NUC/media/remote to stream box? Sure, tweak up the gfx a bit for lightweight gaming. Having this as the 'bottom end' of gfx, will at least let game devs know what's likely to be out there for the huge amount of dell boxes being shifted. I'm also curious how having these sorts of gfx chips will let DX12 + higher end gfx card work. Can they add a few extra frames per second without judder?

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Anonymous Coward]

gotta ask. WHY? an i3 NUC can already easily cope with pretty much all HTPC needs for graphics purposes. waiting on the new ASRock BeeBoxes to replace my current HTPC and they are less than i3 and will easily do 4k. what can you possibly want to do on a HTPC with low to mid range CPU that the current breed can't already do easily?

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Anonymous Coward]

DX12 will take advantage of that Iris Pro even if you are using a discrete GPU.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[hairyfeet]

A better choice for an HTPC would be the AMD Athlon 5350. Its only $49, has a max TDP of only 25w, and it has enough GPU power to run Battlefield 4 so it has more than enough GPU to perform any task you'd want an HTPC to do. The AMD drivers come with a set of codecs so pretty much any video will be hardware accelerated, great for HTPCs which is why I've been using these a LOT in the shop. Cheap, low heat, great graphics, whats not to like?

Linux support for the AMD APUs has been getting pretty damned good lately (thanks to AMD opening their docs and hiring devs) so the Linux guys can pair that chip with a copy of OpenELEC and make themselves an insanely cheap HTPC, we're talking sub $150 if you hit the sales. Personally I like to use Windows 8 on 'em, as IMNSHO the only place the Metro UI works really well is as a 10 foot UI, just pair it with this remote keyboard and voila! Badass HTPC that can even do light gaming for crazy cheap.

As for TFA? Costs $540 and is less powerful than cheaper previous releases.....sounds like a pass. Of course the elephant in the room for both AMD and Intel is their chips became too powerful years ago and with the exception of a teeny tiny niche that uses every cycle on their PC the chips are just too powerful compared with the work the average user has for 'em to do. To use a /. car analogy its like selling everybody funny cars just to go to the store, then being surprised they aren't all lining up to buy the new funny cars with JATO boosters.

Hell even the gamers don't have to buy like they once did, I used to have to buy every other year, now? The PC I replaced was over 6 years old and was still playing games just fine, only reason I replaced it was the oldest needed a PC so I figured I'd use it as an excuse to pass down my Phenom II X6 and grab myself an FX8320E...fricking kicks ass BTW, paired with an R9 280 it plays everything I want in glorious 1080P....but so does my X6, since the oldest has the exact same GPU and his games are just as smooth and look just as good as mine does!

You look at what the AVERAGE, not hardcore gamer, does with their PC? They play casual games like FB games, watch videos, check email....shit that a Pentium dual laptop from 2008 has NO problems doing. Hell even the Intel shrinks for power savings really aren't that big a draw for most because at the shop I've found the average user is away from the plug for a max of 3 hours, a feat my 2011 AMD netbook has zero problems pulling off with a 4 year old battery!

This is why I have no problems staying an AMD shop despite AMD staying at 28nm, because even at 28nm they are still vastly overpowered compared to what the average user does (especially when you look at non rigged benchmarks) because once we went multicore chips went from "good enough" to so insanely powerful it isn't even funny.

Hell if I could still get the boards cheap I would probably have no problem selling Phenom I quads, just as I have no problem selling those cheap Athlon quads now for everything from office boxes to HTPCs, they are just more powerful than anything the average person does by a pretty large measure.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[fnj]

Fine. Go have a ball in your own playpen then. I won't even consider any system except Intel with Intel graphics. It works aces for me. So we cancel each other out.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Kjella]

Anyone paying $300-540 for a processor is not likely to cheap out and ONLY use the integrated graphics. These i5 and i7 processors are turning into a pretty big disappointment. You can get far better graphics with just about the lowliest available sub $100 graphics card, but the options ditch the graphics and get a couple more cores explode in price.

Well if you are gaming when are you ever CPU limited with a 4+ GHz quad core? It would be nice if they dropped the integrated graphics and sold it for less, but the six/eight core processors are typically for people who do video encoding, 3D rendering, lots of VMs or some other semi-pro use. Even GTX 980 Ti in SLI should run fine on an i7-4790k, I guess for triple/quad-SLI you need the extra PCI lanes but then you're extremely far out of the mainstream even for gamers.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[FlyHelicopters]

This is why I have no problems staying an AMD shop despite AMD staying at 28nm, because even at 28nm they are still vastly overpowered compared to what the average user does (especially when you look at non rigged [youtube.com] benchmarks [phoronix.com]) because once we went multicore chips went from "good enough" to so insanely powerful it isn't even funny.

While much of what you said is true, AMD's single biggest problem is power consumption.

No, not for laptops, desktops...

What? Why does that matter?

Because power costs money, some places more than others, but generally consuming lots of power is bad for the planet. Even if your power is hydro, wind, or solar, that power could have been sent somewhere else and been used to replace coal or natural gas, so it is still wasted.

The modern Haswell chips are so much more power efficient than AMD it is sad. Compare equal CPU powered chips and some of the "modern" AMD chips consume three times the power of Intel.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Little_Professor]

The 5350 APU has worse gaming oerformance than an intel with HD Graphics 4600. It's an utter fail http://www.guru3d.com/articles...

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[TheRaven64]

Depends on the AMD chip. I have a box that serves as a NAS and HTPC with an AMD Fusion E-350, which is one of their lower-power chips. Maximum power consumption is 18W for the CPU and GPU. The GPU works fine for decoding HD video (on FreeBSD, presumably it's as good on Linux). It's now around 4-5 years old and the only reason that I'm considering replacing it is that the motherboard can only handle 8GB of RAM, which isn't enough for ZFS deduplication with a 12TB pool.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[unixisc]

I'm considering getting a PC/laptop for SteamOS. I'll probably go w/ the Intel graphics, instead of either AMD or NVIDIA. If the Iris Pro has caught up w/ these other 2, good, but even otherwise, I'd want to avoid the fiasco of bad or incompatible drivers from either AMD or NVIDIA. Intel's graphics works w/ even BSD, so that's what I'd use.

Had I been shopping for another Windows 10 box, I'd go w/ an AMD. But as one poster observed, power consumption of those things is still an issue

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Anonymous Coward]

The E-350 is an ultra mobile CPU, not a desktop CPU. It's also beaten by most dual core Core i3 and i5 CPUs in both performance and power efficiency.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[TheRaven64]

Ultra mobile? I don't think I've ever seen it in that configuration. It's in the same space as Intel's Atom, but unlike the Atom, AMD doesn't try to artificially segment the market too much so you can actually buy one with enough SATA slots for a NAS.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[Bengie]

Intel integrated for you desktop and PCI passthrough your discrete GPU to your guest Windows VM while your host runs Linux. Now you can play your games in Linux.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[FlyHelicopters]

Fair enough, that might be an edge case...

However, one thing that you should keep in mind is that 18W is a whole lot more than 1W.

What does that mean? Intel has learned in recent years that rather than slow down the CPU and let it run tasks over time, it actually saves more power most of the time to run at full speed, get done quickly, then go to sleep mode.

Even if this happens every second or two, it saves more power most of the time.

Consider that a 35W Haswell chip might actually pull less total power than that 18W AMD chip, because it can get done so much faster and go to sleep.

Note: I get that your application might seem busy all the time, but Intel's newest chips look at it in very small slices. So it may be working really hard for half a second, then going to sleep for half a second, then back awake, etc.

That really cuts down on power use.

I recently replaced a Sandy Bridge machine with Haswell for just that reason. It isn't really faster, but it does use less power, enough to be noticed. For a 24/7 machine, the chip becomes free after about 3 years, and that doesn't take into account less AC requirements from lower power.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[hairyfeet]

Sorry friend but you've been bamboozled as it would take SEVENTEEN YEARS to save enough power to make up the price difference between an AMD and an Intel and that is with picking the 125w on the AMD side. Now are you seriously gonna argue you are keeping your chip for nearly 20 years?

I can back this up using kill-a-watt and the excellent board monitoring in my Asus my FX8320 (a "95w" part which I have yet to see go above 60w) uses between 8w-16w on basic tasks like youtube and surfing and right now I'm slamming 3 cores to 100% converting a video to MP4, power usage Johnny? that would be...drumroll...37.19w. So .....yeah, kinda bullshit about the power draw. Its really simple, Intel bases their numbers on "theoretical load" which of course in practice you will never hit, while AMD runs a load of different software on their chips to come up with a worst case scenario draw and bases their numbers on that. They also give higher numbers on their black chips figuring you might OC the shit out of it to allow plenty of headroom but I have yet to see an AMD get even close to the TDP and I've run everything from 939 Athlon to the latest FX and AM1 in the shop. Highest I have ever seen was 68w for an OCed Phenom II X6 with all 6 cores slamming.

Remember to always look at the site you are getting your "news" from without adblock at least once to see where their bread is buttered, are they taking ad revenue from a certain company? This is why you can't believe a damned thing Tom's Hardware says for instance, as even when their own reviewer admitted that "for most games being released today quad cores are a minimum" they recommended an Intel dual core over a cheaper AMD hexacore and then you turn off adblock and wadda ya know, the page is filled with ads for Intel i5s. Hmmm, biased much?

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[raremediumwelldone]

Exactly.

My dad is in his mid 70s. He's stopped going to the local computer places because they won't stop hassling him about how he needs a new PC etc. His computer is about 7 years old. It's a Core2Duo E8600 (3.33 GHz), 2 GB of DDR2 and a SATA hdd (250 GB I think) with integrated graphics. He uses it for email, typing things up in Office, doing his income tax, looking at youtube videos, and occasionally (once a month or so) converting video footage my mom took with their video camera to DVD so he can burn it and watch it on the big tv.

The last time I was over there I fired up task manager and showed him that, other than when he was encoding or when he first started a program, it used 10% of less of his CPU's total processing power. That's one of the reasons he's so happy about getting an upgrade from 7 to 10 for free. He doesn't need to buy a new computer.

Your average user off the street just doesn't need and won't notice the difference in OOMPH if they get a new high-end computer. Wayyy back in my last year of high school (95/96) the school division gave every school a new high-end computer. My school was given a 486 DX4/100.. with I believe 8 MB of RAM. Our previous best computer was a 486DX/25. That new computer was a beast. You could boot to DOS 6.22 and be in Win 3.11 firing up the programs you needed in less time than it took your classmates to even boot up. And the high-school level stuff we did with databases, spreadsheets, etc went from "Oh geez how long is this stupid thing going to take?" to blink-and-you-miss-it.

That's the problem with how far technology has gone. As you said, it's gone PAST what your average slob needs or would notice in their day to day use. Isn't the supposedly magic number 15%? That an improvement has to be a MINIMUM of 15% over the previous for your average user (without prompting or telling them the upgrade is there) to notice the change and go "Wow"?

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[FlyHelicopters]

Sorry friend but you've been bamboozled as it would take SEVENTEEN YEARS to save enough power to make up the price difference between an AMD and an Intel and that is with picking the 125w on the AMD side. Now are you seriously gonna argue you are keeping your chip for nearly 20 years?

That is a cute video, but it doesn't show anything but a guy talking.

Frankly, my own testing shows otherwise, the AMD chip uses twice the power as the Intel chip at load and 50% more at idle.

For a computer that is on 24/7, that has stuff often running for hours (I often set it to run overnight tasks, so it spends many hours at 100% load), the difference adds up.

He also doesn't take into account the needed cooling for the extra heat. I'm in Texas, I pay to AC my home. The extra power is nearly doubled due to the need to cool the room the computers are in.

Finally, there is performance to consider. He only looked at the two computers running for 4 hours at 100%. Fine, but what happens when the Intel chip gets the same job done in 3 hours and can go idle, while the AMD chip runs 100% for an extra hour.

The video is terrible, it doesn't take into account multiple factors.

Payback is about 3 years, give or take. I've done the math, AMD makes no sense for high end computers. It can make sense for the low end stuff, but if you have data crunching to do, there is nothing but Intel to consider.

Re:The important details: Slower and over 540$

[TheRaven64]

The peak power consumption is important for one other reason: heat. The machine that I was talking about is in a small NAS case (4 drive bays, slimline optical drive, power distribution board, mini-ITX motherboard, no other spare space). It also on has a (fanless) 120W PSU, so it's quite easy to go over the available power if the CPU can spike up to a high peak. I'll keep the newer Intel chips in mind when I upgrade, but it looks as if most of the mini-ITX motherboards are still limited to 16GB of RAM and being able to upgrade to 32GB would be the main thing that would prompt me to replace the motherboard. Oh, and Haswell still doesn't have working FreeBSD drivers, so that wouldn't be an option yet.

Less GPU more cores.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I saw the uncapped version of the chip showing it's layout.

Are there versions of this chip with less GPU and more cores?

Re:Less GPU more cores.

[GigaplexNZ]

No. If that's what you're after, you'll need to skip Broadwell and wait for Skylake.

Re:Less GPU more cores.

[KingMotley]

Isn't that was haswell-E is about?

Re:Iris is for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, I say BAAAAAAA!

DO NOT WANT

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

CPU/GPU integration is for farmers, to paraphrase Seymour Cray.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[DigiShaman]

I could be wrong here, but I thought nVidia drivers leveraged the capabilities of the CPU GPU subsystem for co-processing in symbiotic fashion. Meaning, dedicated GPU performance in enhanced with the Intel integrated graphics even if you're not directly using it. Is that not the case?

Re:DO NOT WANT

[GigaplexNZ]

You're probably thinking of NVIDIAs Optimus technology in portable devices. In which case, no, the Intel graphics aren't enhancing anything. The output from the NVIDIA chip gets piped through the Intel chip, as the Intel chip is the only one attached to the display. It's a solution to requiring a reboot with muxed GPU switching solutions. There's also a mild performance reduction with the Optimus solution.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[thegarbz]

Yes farmers.

And businesses

And schools, governments, integrated devices, laptops, tablets, low cost devices, small size devices, and 95% of the general purpose PCs on the market.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

This is a top-of-the-line I7. It's for high-end workstations, not for ANY of "schools, governments, integrated devices, laptops, tablets, low cost devices, small size devices, and 95% of the general purpose PCs on the market". The kind of machines it's meant for will, by definition, have separate video cards.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[serviscope_minor]

CPU/GPU integration is for farmers, to paraphrase Seymour Cray.

CPU/GPU integration has much lower latency than discrete a GPU. The HSA based AMD chips pass data from the fast, single threaded, fast branching core to the massive array of relatively slow FPU units in a few nanoseconds.

Which is why HSA benchmarks seem to work so well

http://www.tomshardware.com/re...
http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri...

If you want fast comptuting, low latency comms is where it's at :)

Re:DO NOT WANT

[Anonymous Coward]

High end workstations aren't all used by gamers.
I use a my workstation for synthesis and simulation of circuits.
Nor GPU required other than to display my desktop and the occasional youtube video.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[thegarbz]

Horseshit. Video cards are special purpose items these days and there are many use cases for a system with a top of the line GPU but little to no graphics grunt. But even if you did want graphics grunt unless you're doing complex 3D drafting and need a Quattro or something similar this CPU is able to beat last generation dedicated GPUs and even scores an impressive 130fps in GTAV at 1080p. If you NEED something more than this you are most definitely in special purpose category (i.e. 3D design, or heavy gaming).

The workstation is designed by the task it achieves, not the components plugged into the motherboard.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[Anonymous Coward]

... this CPU is able to beat last generation dedicated GPUs and even scores an impressive 130fps in GTAV at 1080p.

Which still leaves it effectively in no man's land.
People who can and are willing to pay top dollars for top graphics still won't buy it, and tie themselves in to a solution which is basically un-upgradeable. (Yeah you could, but why spend the dollars for the iris pro to begin with then? Doesn't make sense.)

And then on the other hand, if you are in a position where this level of graphic performance is deemed sufficient for the duration of the lifetime for the system, I don't think it's price/performance ratio really grants it any market. If you're content with integrated graphics, you're not going to pay for this one.

All in all it's pretty typical attempt from Intel when trying to ape someone else: No market, and way too expensive. Just think of when they made a stab at the discrete graphics market (i740). Half the performance of the competition, three times as pricey.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[Khyber]

" The output from the NVIDIA chip gets piped through the Intel chip, as the Intel chip is the only one attached to the display."

"There's also a mild performance reduction with the Optimus solution."

So, here I sit on a desktop system with both discrete GPU (GTX 260 Core 216) and an Intel IGP, triple-monitor setup.

I absolutely fucking hate when the system renders on the GTX yet insists on displaying through the monitor attached to the Intel IGP. We're talking a no-shit measured 50% drop in framerate - FOR DOOM I/II ON THE ZANDRONUM PORT.

I can only imagine the shit performance Optimus provides, and that is why I've explicitly avoided buying laptop systems using Intel/nVidia with Optimus.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[Khyber]

"Horseshit. Video cards are special purpose items these days "

I guess you haven't heard of GPGPU. Well, given your UID, not a surprise.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[Khyber]

" this CPU is able to beat last generation dedicated GPUs"

To boot, no, bullshit, and I proved this in the AMD spreadsheet performance comments from yesterday/day before. This new i7 processor can't even match a 9800GTX+ in single-precision FLOPs.

So, no, it isn't even beating GPUs from SEVEN GENERATIONS ago.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[DigiShaman]

FYI, you can disable Optimus in BIOS. Well, at least in a Dell Precision Laptop. I can only imagine it being a universal feature that can be user disabled on any computer.

Re: DO NOT WANT

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not a universal feature to be able to disable Optimus and still be able to use the NVIDIA card.

Re: DO NOT WANT

[Anonymous Coward]

Optimus is not used in desktops as far as I'm aware. The closest thing I've heard of in desktops is Lucidlogix MVP, which is entirely optional.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the one thing Intel won't ever say out loud is that they have the worst graphics in the PC industry. It's true now and it has been true for 20+ years. If you care about graphics performance then don't get Intel for that.

Now, the standard caveats apply. There are lots of business/casual uses of PC's that don't need much graphics horsepower. Iris Pro graphics are better than nothing and certainly much better than every low end (within the Intel product line!) and older Intel graphics solutions. Keep your expectations in check and Iris Pro might be sufficient.

Also, the best overall performing PC's use an Intel CPU and a discrete 3rd party graphics card. But when you have to ignore the on-chip graphics circuitry to do that, well, that tells you something.

Re:DO NOT WANT

[thegarbz]

The GTX570 outperforms the 9800GTX in all specs and benchmarks by a long margin, and the i7-5775C sans dedicated graphics card scores within 15% of the GTX570 on all games tested.

So go fuck your hat.

Re:Iris is for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not a cow. Meow.

Pff.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to take any benchmarking seriously when they still treat SunSpider as something meaningful. Get with the times, guys.

Re:Pff.

[bloodhawk]

oops, replied to wrong post originally. this belongs here

It's hothardware, what do you expect. plenty of quality hardware sites out there to get decent reviews if your interested. As it is hothardware you can guarantee that they are at least a month behind the more reputable sites.

Skylake is two weeks away

[Anonymous Coward]

DO NOT buy a broadwell chip. Skylake desktop chips are expected to launch August 5th @ Gamescom.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[bloodhawk]

It's hothardware, what do you expect. plenty of quality hardware sites out there to get decent reviews if your interested. As it is hothardware you can guarantee that they are at least a month behind the more reputable sites.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Blaskowicz]

Skylake has same CPU performance, and slower GPU (no eDRAM). And version 1.0 motherboards.
Your advice is sound, but mostly if you don't need/care about the GPU or if you want new features like hdmi 2.0 and h265 decoder

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Blaskowicz]

Or support for 64GB ram on the Skylake ; or wanting the newer GPU 5-10 years down the road. Yes, many reasons to get a Skylake. If you do want fastest CPU and fastest integrated GPU, Broadwell it is.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[GigaplexNZ]

How certain are you that there will be no eDRAM versions of socketed Skylake?

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Anonymous Coward]

That will come in 2016 . . . possibly late Q2/early Q3 2016. We may not even see anything quite like that until Kabylake.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Solandri]

Skylake has same CPU performance, and slower GPU (no eDRAM). And version 1.0 motherboards. Your advice is sound, but mostly if you don't need/care about the GPU

Why would you care about the GPU on a desktop? If you don't want to bother with a graphics card and want to use integrated graphics, use a regular Broadwell or Skylake i7. If you need a GPU, add a graphics card.

Iris Pro sorta kinda makes sense on laptops - slightly better than integrated performance for slightly more power consumption, without having to jump up to the power draw of a discrete GPU and messing around with switchable graphics. But I haven't seen a use case for Iris Pro on the desktop.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[floodo1]

lol except Broadwell drops into a lot of existing mobos (i.e. z97 and it's variants)

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[msobkow]

Not everyone wants the noise of an add-on video card. Some of us don't game, and only need "good enough" graphics to drive the display manager requirements. Add on a dollar or two saved on the power bill per year, less money spent on the power supply, and the money saved for the no-longer-necessary add-on graphics card, and built-in CPU graphics sounds like a "win" to me.

I might keep on using my fanless NVidia card on my next box, but I'm going to wait and see whether I can saturate my drive IOs while putting up with the shared memory of the built-in GPU first. If I can saturate the drive, I'll save the power load and stick with the built-in graphics. Besides, Intel has a better reputation for their drivers on Linux than NVidia does. Not that I've ever had problems with the NVidia drivers myself, but in theory they can be a problem.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Anonymous Coward]

and Skylake has support for DDR4....

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Khyber]

"or wanting the newer GPU 5-10 years down the road"

At the current pace of technology, it is very likely that 5-10 years down the road your system won't even support/have the new bus slot the newer GPUs will require. That's including the current-gen of processor we are now discussing. PCI express is going to go away with direct processor interconnects on an interposer. Soon we will be at the point I predicted in my teenage years, where we have a closely-linked multi-socket motherboard, and all we do is replace the primary processors. RAM, Audio, Networking, all will be self-contained. CPU with 128GB RAM on-die? GPU with access to the same memory on the same interposer? Multiple sockets on a single motherboard (which is in and of itself just a large-scale interposer...)

And likely 5 years after that, my little dream will die out to someone with a better idea.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Khyber]

"Some of us don't game, and only need "good enough" graphics to drive the display manager requirements"

Okay, here's your 256KB GPU RAM. Have fun!

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[Blaskowicz]

Eh, I wrote it badly :) I wanted to mean that 5-10 years down the road, you're a bit better off having a Skylake GPU than a Broadwell GPU, for driver support/features.

I believe PCIe still has some life left - PCIe 4.0.
You're probably right in some way but this is the death of the PC as an open platform : you would only buy Intel stuff that only works with Intel stuff, AMD stuff that only works with AMD stuff (already that way with motherboard chipsets, but you still have additional controllers) or the third party hardware would have to be made for the specific platorm. Like 25 years ago with a card for Amiga, a card for Mac, a card for IBM PS/2..

You can go check the Intel Purley platform : multi-socket Skylake (both -EP and -EX). It's like your idea!, but with multiple "regular" CPU socket. Very high end, what with six channels of ddr4 per socket ; a socket will either take a regular Xeon (just a big core i7), a Xeon Phi which does have HBM or equivalent, or something else.
But if you want a sound card that will go to plain PCIe or USB.
Similar is the NVLink bus (from nvidia) that will link between GPUs, or to IBM Power9 (they call it "CAPI"). Even more expensive (well, IBM POWER8 / POWER9 ought to trickle down so you can get a motherboard made by Tyan, Supermicro etc. instead of buying an IBM computer that costs like a house)

For consumer stuff I will rather expect just a single socket. Most people are interested in a $50-$100 motherboard rather than a $500 one.

Re:Skylake is two weeks away

[msobkow]

Even a megapixel display at 24 bits required 3MB per frame... and a megapixel display has been "low end" for a lot of years now!

Seriously, though -- why does everyone sneer at the fact that not everyone is a gamer? Why are gamers so god damned fucking ARROGANT about their "my dick is bigger than yours" hardware?

Re: Iris is for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bark bark!

Re:Slower and over 540$ - List is $366

[The Optimizer]

It's officially not released yet, and the seller linked to is in Japan and gouging anyone who can't wait another couple weeks. I'm not sure how or what stock they got a hold of.

According to Intel, list price is $377 boxed or $366 Tray. Not $540.

Workstation Tests

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to see some L4 cache consuming HPC application tests. The previous Iris cache already showed something interesting in that area, in terms of performance per clock frequency.

Re:Workstation Tests

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Isn't that the only reason to care about this particular part? The laptop version is of interest because it has the distinction of being the fastest GPU(and probably pretty close to the fastest CPU) you can buy in any laptop too small/thin/etc. for a discrete GPU. The desktop version is just a solution looking for a problem unless the extra cache makes it better than other i7s.

Re:Iris is for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a cow, Caw Caw!