For those of you following what Intel has been up to, they officially announced their Broadwell based CPUs at Computex this year. Last year we did see a Broadwell based Core-M CPU come out for some ultrbooks but beyond that everyone has been waiting to see what they would have to offer for desktops and normal laptops. Well coverage has been trickling out and you can expect to see CPUs finding their way into stores soon as well. Today I’m going to take a look at the Core i7-5775C, Intel’s flagship desktop model. You will also notice their isn’t a new chipset launch to go with this one as these 14nm Broadwell CPUs run on the same 9 Series Intel chipset that the Haswell based CPUs ran on.
Product Name: Intel Core i7-5775C
Review Sample Provided by: Intel
Written by: Wes
Pictures by: Wes
Amazon Link: HERE
Specifications | |
Microarchitecture | 14nm |
Process Node | Broadwell |
TDP | 65 W |
Cores/Threads | 4/8 |
CPU Base Freq (GHz) | 3.3 GHz |
Max Turbo Freq (GHz) | 3.7 GHz |
DDR3 (MHz) | DDR3L 1333/1600 |
L3 Cache | 6 MB |
Intel® HD Graphics | Intel® Iris™ Pro Graphics 6200 |
Intel® Wireless Display | Yes |
Graphics Base Frequency | 300MHz |
Graphics Max Dynamic Frequency | 1.15 GHz |
Graphics Video Max Memory | 1.7 GB |
Intel® Hyper-threading Technology |
Yes |
Intel® Quick Sync Video | Yes |
Intel® Virtualization Technology | Yes |
PCI Express 3.0 | Yes |
Socket | LGA-1150 |
Broadwell
Plans don’t always work out, I’m sure you have been in situations where you planned on doing something at a specific time and something came up. Well in the case of Broadwell Intel ran into production issues a while back as they attempted to drop down to a 14nm production process. Because of that we are just now seeing Broadwell CPUs. Broadwell was originally scheduled to launch back with the Z97 launch but in its place was the Haswell refresh. Well things happen and now things are worked out and we are officially starting to see Broadwell CPUs trickle into the market. This does make for interesting timing with the upcoming Skylake launch though. Broadwell is the “Tick” in Intels Tick Tock release schedule. The tick is typically a drop in die size and efficiency where the tocks introduce bigger tech and typically require full chipset changes. In this case Broadwell is supported by the 9 series motherboards but Skylake will require new boards to support its move to DDR4 along with other changes.
What is also interesting about this launch is that unlike most other launches they aren’t introducing a high clock speed model like Devils Canyon launch. The i7-5775C that I will be testing today runs a base clock of 3.3 and a turbo clock of 3.7. Still very respectable numbers, but it’s clear the focus was in other areas. Broadwells smaller manufacturing made even more room on the die for them to slip in their Iris Pro 6200 GPU. The Iris Pro 6200 has 48 execution units and 128 MB of eDRAM. For reference Haswell had just 20 execution units so this is a major change. This isn’t a big surprise as every CPU launch from Intel has seen big jumps in performance on the GPU side. Gamers who build their own PCs might not be worried about the onboard graphics, but you should. Beyond the improvements you will see on PCs without a dedicated GPU, improvements in onboard graphics make room for games to push limits more without leaving people on laptops and OEM PCs behind.
Intel did slightly change their naming with this launch as well so there will be some confusion for people who don’t follow the launches closely. They went to C in place of K at the end of the CPUs to designate that they are overclockable. We also have a 5 at the end of each CPU where in the past you would normally see a 0. They still have the i5 and i7 designations that split up the CPUs with hyperthreading from similar CPUs without it.
Like I mentioned before, the i7-5775C was originally planned to be launched with the Z97 launch, so its no surprise that they stuck with the 1150 socket and the same chipset. All of the boards do require updates to support the new CPUs, depending on the manufacture that might be simple or a pain. In our case I tested both on an MSI board and again on an Asus. I originally had issues with both but later got things working on the Asus after finding a second note in their update notes that points out that you need to use a special tool to update for Broadwell. Hopefully in the future they make things a little more clear.
Just for fun I also included a few shots of the i7-5775C next to an Intel i7-5960X Haswell-E from the LGA-2011 socket just to show the size difference.
Our Test Procedures and Test Benches
Our CPU Test Benches for each CPU tested | |
Intel Socket 1150 (Broadwell) |
MSI Z97 Gaming 9 AC Kingston HyperX 3000k 240GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U12S heatsink Thermaltake Grand 850W PSU Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Dimastech Test Bench |
AMD Socket AM3+ |
Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional Kingston HyperX 128GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U14S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 2011v3 (Haswell-E) |
Asus X99-Deluxe Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666MHz DDR4 4x4GB OCZ Vector 150 120GB SSD Western Digital Velociraptor 600GB HDD (for steam) Thermaltake Grand 850W PSU Noctua NH-U12S heatsink Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Dimastech Test Bench |
AMD Socket FM2+ |
Asus A88-Pro Kingston HyperX 128GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U14S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
AMD Socket FM2 |
Asus F2 A85-V Pro OCZ Agility 3 120GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U14S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1150 (Devil’s Canyon) |
Asus Z97-A Kingston HyperX 3000k 240GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U12S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1150 (Haswell) |
MSI Z87-G45 Gaming Kingston HyperX 128GB SSD Kingston HyperX 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM Noctua NH-U12S heatsink Cooler Master V1000 Power Supply Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1155 (Ivy Bridge) |
Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram 1600Mhz 2x2Gb Intel DZ77GA-70K OCZ Agility 3 120Gb SSD Noctua NH-C14 heatsink Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850Watt PSU Two Nvidia GTX580’s for SLI testing Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 2011 (Sandy Bridge-E) |
Intel DX79SI Motherboard Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600MHz Quad Channel Ram Two Kingston HyperX SATA 3 SSD’s in RAID 0 Intel Active Thermal Solution RTS2011LC Water-cooling Cooler Master Silent PRO Gold 1200w PSU Nvidia GTX 780 Video Card Highspeedpc Test Bench |
Intel Socket 1155 (Sandy Bridge) |
Crucial Ballistix Tracer Ram 1600Mhz 2x2Gb FATAL1TY P67 Profess1onal Series Motherboard OCZ Agility 60Gb SSD Noctua NH-C14 heatsink Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850Watt PSU Sapphire HD6970 BF:BC2 Edition for AMD testing Two Nvidia GTX580’s for SLI testing Microcool Banchetto 101 Test bench |
Intel Socket 1366 |
Gigabyte G-1 Assassin Gaming Motherboard EVGA Classified GTX580 Video card Cooler Master HAFX Nvidia Edition Case Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3 Ram 1600MHz Cool-It Water-cooling Cooler Master Silent PRO Gold 1200w PSU Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue SSD |
CPU Testing Procedures | |
Bioshock Infinite | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
Tomb Raider | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
Hitman: Absolution | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
Sleeping Dogs | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Xtreme” quality setting. |
3DMark Fire Strike | Physics Score – Performance benchmark |
wPrime | 1024M and 32M |
X264 HD Benchmark | Pass 1 and Pass 2 |
Cinebench | CPU and CPU (Single Core results) |
Passmark 8 | CPU Mark Score |
PCMark 7 | Full benchmark Suite |
Power Usage | Idle and load testing using a Kill-A-Watt and Wprime to put the cpu under load |
PCMark 8 | Home test is run both with and without OpenCL |
Temps | Prime95 to load, motherboard software to read temperature |
Onboard Testing Procedures | |
Bioshock Infinite | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting at 1080p |
Tomb Raider | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting at 1080p |
Hitman: Absolution | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting at 1080p |
Sleeping Dogs | Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool on the “Medium” quality setting at 1080p |
3DMark Fire Strike | Performance setting – GPU Score |
Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 | Extreme preset |
Unreal Valley Benchmark 1.0 | Extreme HD Preset |
F1 2013 | Ultra Preset |
Cinebench R11.5 | OpenGL benchmark |
Cinebench R15 | OpenGL benchmark |
GRID Autosport | Ultra and Medium presets at 1080p |
CPU Performance
Once I had the i7-5775C up and running on our testbench to put it to the test I ran it through our usual CPU benchmark suite to see how well it performs. These tests are all ran using a GTX 780 to keep a level playing field. The first test I ran was X264 HD to see how well Broadwell handles encoding. The results were interesting. Our graph is sorted by the second pass and puts the 5775C down just below the aMD FX-9590 with its extremely high clock speeds. The first pass though actually puts the CPU up even higher with just the 4960X, 3970X, and 4790K performing better.
Next I jumped into my favorite benchmark, Cinebench. This was run using Cinebench R11.5 for consistency but I also tested using the newer R15 for future reference as well. The reason I love this benchmark so much is because it runs two tests, one using all of the cores and then a second test with just one core. This allows us to see how efficient the CPU is when running on older software that doesn’t support multiple cores. Here the 5775C came in just slightly below the older 4770K in the multicore benchmark. The single core benchmark was similar with a 1.71. With a comparable clock speed Broadwell would outperform the older CPUs but it is clearly being held back by lower clocks and a more power efficient TDP.
Next used Passmark’s CPU benchmark as a general synthetic benchmark. Passmark runs a long list of tests and then puts them all together with a score, in this case we only use the CPU score not the full Passmark score to prevent the SSD and GPU from effecting the score. Here the 5775C came in noticeably lower than the 4770K and down far too close to the dated 3770K than I would like to see. Again the clock speeds hurt performance and in this case it was even more noticeable.
Next I ran through PCMark 8 using both the OpenCL setting and the conventional setting to see how well the 5775C would perform in real life usage. PCMark 8 benchmarks using your browser and office along with testing video performance to get an idea of what to expect day to day rather than just hypothetical synthetic benchmarks. Here the 5775C outperformed the 5960X but had trouble with the higher clock speed CPUs like the 4790K as well as AMDs 9590.
Next to test pure mathematics I used wPrime on both of its settings. Here the lower the score the better. This time around we did outperform the i7-4770K but the CPUs with additional cores like the 2011 based Intel CPUs and AMDs FX line pull ahead.
Next I ran through 3DMark Fire Strike but focused on the Physics Score as it is completely CPU dependent. Surprisingly the 5775C pulled a nice lead on the 4770K and nearly caught up to the 4790K. This put it up in the top 1/3 of the charts with the big 6 and 8 core Intel CPUs up above them.
Next I ran the i7-5775C along with our GTX 780 through four popular games to get an idea of how well the different CPUs effect the in game performance. In Tomb Raider for example the results are almost completely GPU limited so you only see a very slight change in performance. In some of the other games though we actually see charts similar to in the CPU specific testing. In Bioshock Infinite for example you can pick up an additional 10-20 FPS with a high clock speed Intel CPU. I know a lot of people will throw a lot of money into a new GPU to see improvements like that. It is completely dependent on the game though.
Onboard GPU Performance
We can’t discount the built in GPU as well, especially with the new Iris 6200 GPU seeing the biggest improvements in the move to Broadwell. So I did run the i7-5775C through our benchmark suite and along with that I have added a few new tests as well. To start off my testing I ran the 5775C in Cinebench R11.5 and R15. This time testing using the OpenCL setting to test the graphics performance rather than compute performance. The results are the average FPS that it was capable of rendering a video. As you can see the 5775C dominated in this test. Not only did it out perform the i7-4790K, but it also put over 20 FPS on the AMD A10-7850K when it was paired with a matching dedicated GPU for crossfire.
Next I ran it through 3DMark Fire Strike on the performance setting. This time around it didn’t outperformed the crossfired AMD but it put 300+ points on the next closest CPU. For comparison this is closer to what you would expect from an HD 7750 or similar, they aren’t exactly replacing dedicated GPUs here, but the performance is finally reaching a point where you can trust it in most games with things turns down where in the past onboard could only play a few Facebook games.
Next I ran through both the older Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 as well as the Valley 1.0 benchmark as well. I still consider these to be synthetic benchmarks because they aren’t a specific game, but being based on the Unigine engine they are a great way to see how the 5775C will perform in Unigine based games. It’s no surprise that once again it topped the charts, even against the CPU paired with a dedicated GPU. The FPS numbers aren’t all that impressive because these tests are run on the Extreme and Extreme HD settings for easy duplication, but with the performance doubling over pervious Intel designs I am impressed.
F1 2013 is a little dated, especially now that they just released F1 2015 but it is still a great benchmark to compare the performance between all of the onboard GPUs. It is known for being a little AMD favored when compared to Nvidia cards so it’s no surprise that the A10-7850K pulled ahead here a little more than in previous benchmarks. A small win for Intel though is to finally be able to say this game is completely playable where past CPUs were struggling.
In Bioshock Intel went from a rough 15 FPS on the i7-4790K to a more than playable 37 FPS on the i7-5775C that gave the 7850K with the R7 250 in crossfire a run for its money.
The same happened in Tomb Raider as well with the crossfired setup and the 5775C well above everything else and well into the playable range as well. This is of course tested at a medium setting, but it is still a great game that I would never think could be played on an onboard GPU.
In Hitman the 5775C struggled a little. It still out performed every other onboard GPU but it didn’t pull the huge lead that they had in most of the other tests. That said when you keep in mind the jump to 15FPS from 6-7FPS it is an amazing improvement over the Haswell CPUs.
In Sleeping Dogs the i7-5775C is once again well ahead of all of the other onboard GPUs with a respectable 43 FPS.
I also included my results from GRID Autosports where I ran the benchmark at both Medium and Ultra settings. Clearly ultra isn’t ideal for the i7-5775C but the medium settings put us right up close to 60 FPS in a new game and frankly even at medium settings the game looks great.
Overclocking, Cooling, and Power
Beyond the CPU and GPU performance it is also important to consider a CPUs efficiency. We can get a look at this when we take a look at the power usage as well as how warm it runs. Generally as the TDP and power usage goes down CPUs run cooler as well. For Broadwell they did drop the microarchitecture down to 14nm, for the most part going smaller does mean a little better efficiency. In the case of the i7-5775C they also dropped the TDP down 65 watts. The i7-4770K had a TDP of 84 watts and the i7-4790K had a TDP of 88 watts so they did make a big improvement there. That is partially from the lower clock speeds as well as the smaller microarchitecture. Because of that it’s not a big surprise when we see that the power usage for the 5775C pulled an impressively low 85 watts under load and 46 at idle. The idle number is actually up from the 4770K but the load numbers are the lowest we have tested on a full PC.
Oddly enough though our temperature results weren’t exactly what I expected. They are still well below the heater that is the AMD 9590 but they were actually up over the 4770K and 4790K. I suspect that going to the smaller architecture raised the temperatures slightly and it also explains why Intel didn’t go with higher clock speeds than they did with the 5775C.
Once I saw the temperatures that the 5775C put out I was even more curious how it would overclock. Typically the biggest limitation when overclocking is heat so running a little warmer than past models, even with it being such a small amount, could change the overclocking performance. When overclocking I slowly bumped up the multipliers until I had issues then I turned up the voltage, then back to the multipliers, over and over until I went as high on the voltage as I was comfortable with. That limit was at 1.47 for me, I’m sure there is some room left in it, even on air but in the end I was able to see 4.4 comfortably. There was a little room in the actual clock as well, but it didn’t give us much.
Overall and Final Verdict
So like I said Broadwell is an interesting launch. It isn’t very often that a CPU gets launched this late in its cycle. Being late takes away a little of its excitement, especially because to fill in for its launch Intel introduced the 4790K, a monster of a CPU. So the i7-5775C had to follow up a CPU with a high clock speed. So when I got into testing the CPU side of things the i-5775C fell a little flat compared to the 4770K and 4790K. In a lot of benchmarks it had a hard time keeping up with the 4770K let alone the 4790K. With a lower clock speed the i7-5775C isn’t a step up for anyone who invested in a high end Haswell CPU. On top of that it runs a little warm as well.
The funny thing about the 5775C, for everything that is mediocre on the CPU side of things, the onboard GPU blew everything else away. Don’t get me wrong it isn’t going to be replacing a dedicated GPU for gamers, but it was a 2 to 3 time improvement over past Intel CPUs. This translated in actual playable performance in most of the games I tried on it as long as you aren’t trying to game at high resolutions. This really opens up options for higher end HTPC’s and other small form factor builds that you might not have room for a large dedicated GPU. Another great use is as a steam box that streams games from your main PC. The low power draw helps this as well.
So where does that leave the i7-5775C? Well as long as the i7-4790K is available on the market this isn’t a CPU I would be recommending for builds that will be using a dedicated GPU. When we figure in the recommended pricing, this becomes even more important. You can pick up a 4790K for about $30 less than the MSRP on the 5775C. The reality is the 5775C (and the i5-5675C that also launched) with its 65 watt TDP is more of a replacement for the 65 watt Haswell parts like the i7-4790S and i5-4690S but it is priced out of that range due to the improved onboard GPU. This makes it the perfect all in one package. Seeing that Skylake is rumored to be well on its way I suspect that is why Intel didn’t bother to bring out a higher TDP model to offer a proper replacement for the 4790K. That said the i7-5775C will most likely end up as a nice upgrade to one of our HTPCs and the 4790K will stay comfortable in my gaming rig, at least until Skylake.
Live Pricing: HERE