Way back in the sands of August 2015, we got a rare sample of the exotic Core i7-5775C in the TR labs. This Broadwell CPU was unique—and remains unique—among Intel desktop chips because of its 128-MB slice of on-package embedded DRAM, or eDRAM. That on-package memory served as a large L4 victim cache for the entire CPU.

Intel includes eDRAM on processors with its Iris Pro integrated graphics processors to save them the trouble of having to depend entirely on system RAM for some types of graphics-related memory accesses, but that turned out not to be eDRAM’s only benefit. Our testing at the time suggested that the i7-5775C’s eDRAM sometimes gave it an edge in 99th-percentile frame times versus the Core i7-6700K, even as it was hampered by clock-speed deficits versus the Skylake part and a last-generation platform that could only use DDR3 RAM.

The chart that started it all

Since that time, the i7-5775C has developed a (possibly exaggerated) reputation among enthusiasts as a 99th-percentile frame-time monster unequaled by anything that has come before or since. Part of that may be our fault—we didn’t test the i7-5775C much in subsequent CPU reviews. Broadwell desktop parts proved both costly and rare as hens’ teeth at retail, and the eDRAM didn’t deliver any notable productivity boost outside of gaming to warrant the extra cost. We generally recommended that people who weren’t obsessed with the very best 99th-percentile frame times go with Skylake parts instead.

Perhaps in the absence of data, the i7-5775C’s stature has grown to the point that enthusiasts still inquire about how its 99th-percentile-frame-time prowess holds up over three years after we uncovered its intriguing performance characteristics. Since people still ask, we figured we ought to answer them with our latest arsenal of CPU-bound games and frame-time measurement tools.

Before we address that question, though, I would temper the expectations of our eager inquirers a bit. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge in three years’ time. AMD’s Ryzen CPUs have thoroughly reshaped what the core and thread count of the mainstream PC looks like, and Intel has responded by adding more cores and threads to its own CPUs. The blue team has pushed single-core clock speeds ever higher, too, from 4.2 GHz on the Skylake i7-6700K to 4.9 GHz on the recently-launched Core i7-9700K or even 5 GHz on the Core i9-9900K.

The improvements haven’t stopped there. DDR4 memory has gotten faster, and overclocked sticks running at 3200 MT/s are now a de facto enthusiast standard versus the 2133 MT/s RAM we first tested with Skylake. Nvidia has released two new graphics architectures in that time, as well, and mere $250-ish graphics cards now deliver performance similar to that of the $550-ish GTX 980 we used back when we originally tested the Core i7-5775C. In the high-end graphics-card market, the GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, and RTX 2080 Ti have all set new bars for what’s possible from a graphics card.

At least for gamers chasing the highest frame rates and lowest 99th-percentile frame times, those developments mean the ceiling for dizzying frame rates has gotten a lot higher, and that means CPU-bound games need a lot more oomph behind them to support the highest frame rates and lowest frame times. That’s especially true of the single-threaded performance department, since that’s how a lot of games that care about processor performance end up bottlenecked.

Given those developments, the i7-5775C doesn’t look particularly well-positioned to get the most out of today’s most demanding graphics cards, eDRAM or otherwise. It’s long seemed unlikely to me that whatever magic led to its above-its-weight-class 99th-percentile frame-time performance in our initial review has held up. Four-core, eight-thread CPUs with DDR3 memory already trail their Skylake and Kaby Lake counterparts when we set up CPU-bound high-refresh-rate gaming experiences, and that eDRAM would have to do a lot of work to catch up entirely with newer chips.

See, Broadwell was never a high-clocking, power-hungry desktop beast (at least for mainstream systems). The 65-W i7-5775C’s four cores and eight threads topped out at a peak speed of 3.7 GHz, and I’ve observed all-core speeds of 3.6 GHz from that chip under good cooling. Those figures were low when Broadwell and Skylake were new, and they’re low now.

Slide courtesy Anandtech

The 5775C’s eDRAM may have given its memory subsystem a boost when we were treading carefully with DDR4 speeds, but now that DDR4-3200 lets Intel’s memory controllers approach 50 GB/s of unidirectional bandwidth in directed testing, the 50 GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth (100 GB/s in aggregate) that Broadwell’s eDRAM cache offers might not be as impressive as it once was. Main memory latency for Intel chips is less of a concern than it used to be, too. Intel claimed that accessing eDRAM would require 30 ns to 32 ns when it combined the Crystal Well eDRAM die with Haswell CPUs. That’s still a fair bit quicker than the 43 ns to 45 ns we record with today’s swiftest Intel chips, but it’s not as far off as CPU memory controllers used to be.

For an idea of the shape of the CPU market today, even our gaming-value favorite, the $200-ish Core i5-8400, has an all-core boost speed of 3.8 GHz. Its Skylake cores are fabricated with a twice-improved version of Intel’s 14-nm process. It benefits from DDR4-2666 at a minimum, and it can be paired with even faster RAM if you opt to run it on a Z370 motherboard. We already spoke of Coffee Lake and Coffee Lake Refresh Core i7s, where chips that bear stickers similar to the i7-5775C’s $366 to $377 suggested price boast peak single-core clock speeds in the range of 4.7 GHz to 4.9 GHz. That’s nothing to sniff at if you’re after the best high-refresh-rate gaming experiences, even if the i7-5775C can be overclocked to make up some of the difference.

A sampling of Core i7-5775Cs on eBay as of this writing

Even if the i7-5775C did deliver exceptional performance and you did want to take the plunge on one of these chips to underpin your 2018 gaming system, it’s not as though these chips are abundant or inexpensive. Three i7-5775Cs are on eBay as I write this, and buyers want anywhere from $329.95 to $350 for their wunderchips. New-in-box models of the Z97 motherboards you’d want to run this chip are no longer available at e-tail, although used boards remain reasonably priced on eBay—a pleasant surprise, if you’ve gone shopping for vintage Intel motherboards of late. Enthusiast DDR3 RAM isn’t much cheaper than run-of-the-mill DDR4-3200 modules, though.

Prices for Intel’s latest enthusiast chips have risen recently thanks to supply issues, to be sure, but one just wouldn’t be saving a ton of money on the road to hypothetical 99th-percentile bliss by getting onto a 2014-era platform. You could miss out on features we take for granted these days, too, like reliable NVMe boot (which has never worked consistently on our Z97 testbed), PCIe 3.0 lanes from the chipset, USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, and much more. The fact is that a four-year-old PC is still a four-year-old PC, and we couldn’t in good conscience recommend that users start with such an aged platform unless the i7-5775C was still delivering indisputable miracles for gaming performance.

I’ve just finished reviewing and testing a wide range of Intel processors for our Core i9-9900K review, and our frame-time digestion tools are warmed up and hungry for more. I figure now is as good a time as any to see how much of the i7-5775C’s magic remains. I’ve dusted off our trusty Z97 motherboard and DDR3 RAM to see what happens when you ask a modestly-clocked quad-core with eight threads and a massive cache to drive today’s single most powerful video card. Let’s find out.

Our testing methods

As always, we did our best to deliver clean benchmarking numbers. We ran each benchmark at least three times and took the median of those results. Our test systems were configured as follows:

Processor Intel Core i7-8700K Intel Core i7-9700K Intel Core i9-9900K CPU cooler Corsair H100i Pro 240-mm closed-loop liquid cooler Motherboard Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master Chipset Intel Z390 Memory size 16 GB Memory type G.Skill Flare X 16 GB (2x 8 GB) DDR4 SDRAM Memory speed 3200 MT/s (actual) Memory timings 14-14-14-34 2T System drive Samsung 960 Pro 512 GB NVMe SSD

Processor AMD Ryzen 7 2700X AMD Ryzen 5 2600X CPU cooler EK Predator 240-mm closed-loop liquid cooler Motherboard Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wifi Chipset AMD X470 Memory size 16 GB Memory type G.Skill Flare X 16 GB (2x 8 GB) DDR4 SDRAM Memory speed 3200 MT/s (actual) Memory timings 14-14-14-34 2T System drive Samsung 960 EVO 500 GB NVMe SSD

Processor AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X CPU cooler Enermax Liqtech TR4 240-mm closed-loop liquid cooler Motherboard Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme Chipset AMD X399 Memory size 32 GB Memory type G.Skill Flare X 32 GB (4x 8 GB) DDR4 SDRAM Memory speed 3200 MT/s (actual) Memory timings 14-14-14-34 1T System drive Samsung 970 EVO 500 GB NVMe SSD

Processor Core i7-5775C Core i9-7900X CPU cooler Corsair H100i Pro 240-mm closed-loop liquid cooler Motherboard Asus Z97-A/USB 3.1 Gigabyte X299 Designare EX Chipset Intel Z97 Intel X299 Memory size 16 GB 32 GB Memory type Corsair Vengeance Pro 16 GB (2x 8 GB) DDR3 SDRAM G.Skill Flare X 32 GB (4x 8 GB) DDR4 SDRAM Memory speed 1866 MT/s (actual) 3200 MT/s (actual) Memory timings 9-10-9-27 14-14-14-34 1T System drive Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SATA SSD Intel 750 Series 400 GB NVMe SSD

Our test systems shared the following components:

Graphics card Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition Graphics driver GeForce 411.63 Power supply Thermaltake Grand Gold 1200 W (AMD) Seasonic Prime Platinum 1000 W (Intel)

Some other notes on our testing methods:

All test systems were updated with the latest firmware, graphics drivers, and Windows updates before we began collecting data, including patches for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities where applicable. As a result, test data from this review should not be compared with results collected in past TR reviews. Similarly, all applications used in the course of data collection were the most current versions available as of press time and cannot be used to cross-compare with older data.

be compared with results collected in past TR reviews. Similarly, all applications used in the course of data collection were the most current versions available as of press time and cannot be used to cross-compare with older data. Our test systems were all configured using the Windows Balanced power plan, including AMD systems that previously would have used the Ryzen Balanced plan. AMD’s suggested configuration for its CPUs no longer includes the Ryzen Balanced power plan as of Windows’ Fall Creators Update, also known as “RS3” or Redstone 3.

Unless otherwise noted, all productivity tests were conducted with a display resolution of 2560×1440 at 60 Hz. Gaming tests were conducted at 1920×1080 and 144 Hz.

Our testing methods are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have any questions regarding our testing methods, feel free to leave a comment on this article or join us in the forums to discuss them.

Crysis 3

Even as it passes six years of age, Crysis 3 remains one of the most punishing games one can run. With an appetite for CPU performance and graphics power alike, this title remains a great way to put the performance of any gaming system in perspective.





The i7-5775C doesn’t work any miracles for Crysis 3 performance in our broad overview of its work in that title. It turns in the lowest average frame rate and highest 99th-percentile frame time of any chip here.





These “time spent beyond X” graphs are meant to show “badness,” those instances where animation may be less than fluid—or at least less than perfect. The formulas behind these graphs add up the amount of time our graphics card spends working on frames beyond certain frame-time thresholds, each with an important implication for gaming smoothness. Recall that our graphics-card tests all consist of one-minute test runs and that 1000 ms equals one second to fully appreciate this data.

The 50-ms threshold is the most notable one, since it corresponds to a 20-FPS average. We figure if you’re not rendering any faster than 20 FPS, even for a moment, then the user is likely to perceive a slowdown. 33 ms correlates to 30 FPS, or a 30-Hz refresh rate. Go lower than that with vsync on, and you’re into the bad voodoo of quantization slowdowns. 16.7 ms correlates to 60 FPS, that golden mark that we’d like to achieve (or surpass) for each and every frame. 11.1 ms correlates to 90 FPS.

To best demonstrate the performance of these systems with a powerful graphics card like the RTX 2080 Ti, it’s useful to look at our strictest graphs. 8.3 ms corresponds to 120 FPS, the lower end of what we’d consider a high-refresh-rate monitor. We’ve recently begun including an even more demanding 6.94-ms mark that corresponds to the 144-Hz maximum rate typical of today’s high-refresh-rate gaming displays.

By these metrics, the i7-5775C doesn’t get off to a great start. Crysis 3 tends to love every core and thread one can throw at it, but even then, the lowly i5-8400 slices about three seconds off the Broadwell chip’s time spent beyond 8.3 ms. The difference is even more stark when we click over to the 6.94-ms graph, where the i7-5775C trails every one of our modern CPUs by a wide margin.

Even if we look at the 16.7-ms mark, where the i7-5775C’s eDRAM is reputed to work miracles on real outlier frames, the wunderchip is at the back of the pack. It’s worth noting that we’re only talking about a couple of frames’ worth of roughness at this threshold, too—nothing the average gamer is likely to spot. Keep that in mind as we proceed through this article: the real differences in performance are the ones where we’re talking about significant fractions of a second worth of time or more in these buckets, not vanishing outliers.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Ubisoft’s most recent Assassin’s Creed games have developed reputations as CPU hogs, so we grabbed Odyssey and put it to the test on our systems using a 1920×1080 resolution and the Ultra High preset.





Assassin’s Creed Odyssey seems to need lots of cores and threads to run well, but that fact doesn’t seem to hurt the i7-5775C as much as it did in Crysis 3. The Broadwell chip ties the i5-8400 for the lowest average frame rate, but its 99th-percentile frame time can’t quite match the entry-level Coffee Lake six-core. The i7-5775C does beat out our Socket AM4 Ryzen CPUs for 99th-percentile frame times, but still, this is hardly a performance miracle.





Starting our analysis at the 16.7-ms mark, the i7-5775C doesn’t hold up to its reputation as a uniquely capable smoother of roughness even compared to the Core i5-8400. Flip over to the 11.1-ms mark, and the 5775C spends more time past it than even our Socket AM4 Ryzen CPUs. The worst of the Ryzen chips’ frames might be rougher than the i7-5775C’s, but they’re still better at delivering sustained performance.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Thanks to its richly detailed environments and copious graphics settings, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided can punish graphics cards at high resolutions and make CPUs sweat at high refresh rates.





Deus Ex: Mankind Divided might be the first title in which we see the i7-5775C’s reputation even somewhat reflected in our data. The 5775C can’t match the i5-8400’s average frame rate, but the two chips are neck-and-neck in our 99th-percentile measure of delivered smoothness.





If we dig into our time-spent-beyond-X data at the 16.7-ms mark, the i7-5775C does actually land near the top of our rankings. Even in the worst case of we’re talking about a handful of frames’ worth of roughness in a sequence of many thousands. The 5775C’s advantage begins to fade as we look at the time spent past the 11.1 ms mark, though, and it’s gone completely if we use 8.3 ms as our threshold of interest. Modern Intel enthusiast chips spend less than half the time—and in the case of our ninth-gen Core parts, far less—than the numbers the i7-5775C puts up here. Again, nothing worth going out and buying this aging chip over.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V‘s lavish simulation of Los Santos and surrounding locales can really put the hurt on a CPU, and we’re putting that characteristic to good use here.





Grand Theft Auto V seems to care about single-threaded performance above all, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the relatively pokey i7-5775C can’t even catch AMD’s high-end desktop CPUs in this title.





The frame-time percentile graphs of these chips are all low and flat, and it’s not unpleasant to game on any of them. That said, the i7-5775C trails every chip here by a wide margin no matter what threshold you choose to look at.

Hitman

After an extended absence from our test suite thanks to a frame rate cap, Hitman is back. This game tends to max out a couple of threads but not every core on a chip, so it’s a good test of the intermediate parts of each processor’s frequency-scaling curve. We cranked the game’s graphics settings at 1920×1080 and got to testing.





Like we saw with Deus Ex, the i7-5775C can’t quite catch the i5-8400 in average frame rates when running Hitman. Its 99th-percentile frame time is still ever-so-slightly better than that of the entry-level Coffee Lake chip, though. I’m not convinced that’s a miracle worth gushing over, but it’s something.





Our time-spent-beyond-X graphs show why I’m not exactly over the moon for the Broadwell chip in this title. The i7-5775C doesn’t suffer from some bizarre and noticeable roughness exhibited by our ninth-gen Core chips at the 16.7-ms and 11.1-ms thresholds, but it trails all but the Ryzen 5 2600X when we begin looking at the more demanding 8.3-ms and 6.94-ms thresholds. The 5775C is performing fine, without a doubt, but it’s not pulling off any performance coups here.

Far Cry 5





Far Cry 5 is another game that seems to care more about memory latency and single-threaded performance than anything, and the i7-5775C still can’t seem to work any miracles compared to its modern mainstream-desktop brethren. The Core i5-8400 delivers both higher peak frame rates and a lower 99th-percentile frame time compared to the Broadwell chip, and even the Ryzen 7 2700X pulls ahead in both measures to some degree.





Our time-spent-beyond-X graphs provide some interesting counterpoints to our high-level overview of performance, though. Far Cry 5 sometimes experiences the occasional big, noticeable spike in frame times, and both the i7-9700K and i5-8400 seem to suffer from those spikes worse than most (although it’s curious that the i7-8700K and i9-9900K don’t). The i7-5775C seems to do a somewhat better job than most chips at keeping those hitches in check, but once we cross over to the 11.1-ms mark and below, the Broadwell chip starts falling as far behind as its lower average frame rate would suggest. Is the occasional zapping of a big frame-time spike of questionable replicability worth wedding yourself to an aging CPU and platform, given what we’ve seen so far from the i7-5775C? Probably not.

Conclusions





The Core i7-5775C holds up well enough in today’s most CPU-intensive games with today’s most powerful graphics card, but it’s hardly the miracle worker its reputation might suggest. This chip’s eDRAM may have allowed it to endure the passage of time better than the average CPU of its era, but it’s not slaying even the most affordable Coffee Lake six-core available now. The Broadwell part is still duking it out with AMD’s latest and greatest Socket AM4 chips, for what it’s worth, although the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X still come out ahead in our final reckoning thanks to their multi-threaded prowess in a couple of titles.

In any case, there is no reason to spend $350 on a used i7-5775C plus whatever you’ll shell out for the aging DDR3 memory and Z97 motherboard you’ll need to run it. Any mainstream Intel CPU you can buy today for $200 or more will provide high-refresh-rate gaming experiences and 99th-percentile frame times superior to those of the Broadwell part, and AMD’s Socket AM4 Ryzens deliver similar gaming performance along with far more multithreaded grunt than the i7-5775C can muster.

Could Intel have made an even more compelling part for gamers over the past couple of years by manufacturing a socketed Skylake, Kaby Lake, or Coffee Lake part with embedded DRAM, especially with the promotion of the eDRAM from a victim cache to a more sophisticated member of the memory hierarchy in Skylake chips that have it? That’s impossible to say, since Broadwell remains the only socketed CPU with eDRAM that Intel has ever produced. Intel has much bigger and more fundamental fish to fry at the moment, so we may never find out how a more modern CPU and eDRAM play together. One can dream, though.

If you’re after the best 99th-percentile frame times in CPU-dependent gaming today, you can safely regard the i7-5775C as a collector’s item rather than an everlasting panacea for the frame-time spikes and stutters we despise. A Core i7-8700K or Core i7-9700K will run circles around the i7-5775C in both average and 99th-percentile FPS, dollar for dollar. Those chips have considerable advantages in single-threaded clock speeds and multithreaded bang-for-the-buck, too, and they run on modern platforms with modern memory and connectivity. Even though the pace of PC hardware innovations has slowed, the small improvements we’ve enjoyed from year to year have added up, and the i7-5775C’s unique virtues haven’t staved off erosion from the sands of time.