Why an Overclockable Core i3 Might Not Exist: The Supermicro C7H170-M and Intel Core i3-6100TE Review
by Ian Cutress on March 17, 2016 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Motherboards
- Core i3
- Supermicro
- Overclocking
Professional Performance: Windows
Agisoft Photoscan – 2D to 3D Image Manipulation: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
The variable workload of Agisoft means there are parts where the code path is single threaded and others where multithreading is near perfect. As a result we see the overclocked i3 march past almost all the AMD parts but not up to the Core i5s.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is a benchmark based around Cinema 4D, and is fairly well known among enthusiasts for stressing the CPU for a provided workload. Results are given as a score, where higher is better.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
At double 4K, Handbrake requires enough cache and buffers to keep supplying frames. The Core i3 line has a reduced L3 compared to the Core i5s, but also has to share it between threads (1.5MB/thread compared to 2MB per core) which can cause bottlenecks.
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C.C. - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
First! Great Article Ian..I really wish Intel hadn't decided to stop the Mobo work around's allowing i3 overclocking..ImSpartacus - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link
Yeah, fantastic article. I loved how he ran benchmarks at various overclocks.edlee - Friday, March 18, 2016 - link
This was really a shame that this article was not testing a regular i3 with a normal tdp, it would have shown a definate overclock to 4.5ghz and beating stock i5 by a good margin.It would become the celeron 300a of this generation
ImSpartacus - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link
Yeah, is there a section that explains why a 6100 wasn't used?I admittedly still haven't read the whole article, I found the part that states that a 6100te is a very unusual oem-only part.
RobATiOyP - Saturday, March 19, 2016 - link
Hardly the 300a was a guaranteed 50% oc affecting both cpu, FSB and memory on a socket giving a clean & supported widely deployed set of frequencies, without any drawbacks. It meant a relatively cheap Celeron could compete with top of the line PII's using slower cache memory on Slot riser cards.The skylake BCLK oc, seems to come withdrawbacks slow downs have shown up in some benchmarks, probably due to the complexity of multiple timing domains in modern chips.
cobrax5 - Monday, March 21, 2016 - link
The awesome thing with the 300A was the 128KB of full speed cache. I beleive the PII's had double the cache but at half the speed. I loved the 300A - possibly my favorite processor of all time because of when I got it, etc. I had a friend who did the hack to go dual socket 300A's. I remember this whole problem of wanting to run 98SE, but only the NT kernel supported multiple CPU's/sockets/cores (all the same back then...memories).Anyone remember the Voodoo 1/2 add-in cards? Those things were pretty sweet for what they did for 3D games, despite the funny VGA passthru cable...
0ldman79 - Monday, April 4, 2016 - link
Voodoo 2 and the 300A. The good old days.I didn't get to play with the 300A, but I got the Celeron 500 and 533, they'd hit 700+ if done right. I got to play with dozens of them and find a good one. It was fun overclocking a Dell.
RobATiOyP - Sunday, March 20, 2016 - link
The point is that CPUs get thermally limitted, increasing volts can increase Watts in a very small area. Therefore there's some sense in trying out a power efficient chip, which has headroom.What the benchmarks really seem to show, is to do well on multi-threaded you need.. 4+ cores. In single thread the cheap Pentium and this i3, do well against the more expensive stock chips.
Flunk - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
Interesting article, although it is a little bit skewed to compare the stock performance of that i5 6600 vs the overclocked i3 without including overclocked numbers for the i5, which you could have gotten using the same motherboard you tested the i3 on.Ian Cutress - Thursday, March 17, 2016 - link
That might be in a future piece. Depending on how open base clock overclocking is going to be, at this point I'm wondering if each Skylake CPU I get in should have the overclock treatment given how so few motherboards enable it.