Conclusion - Sandy Bridge Still Holds It's Own

I had originally planned on spending a few days benchmarking and writing this article but the dreaded specter of mission creep ended up determining the timeline more than my intents did. It started with curiosity about how Sandy Bridge and Coffee Lake compared against one another but then as the gaming results trickled in, I knew testing at stock settings with a GTX 1070 would only be the tip of the iceberg. And so overclocking, more resolutions and the GTX 1080 Ti ended up factoring quite heavily into the equation.At the beginning of this article I posed a pretty simple question: but is it actually worthwhile for you to upgrade a six year old system right now? The answer is a perplexing Yes, No and Maybe. Now before you start the hate mail, let me explain why there are three potential scenarios, all of which largely depend on an individual’s situation and their wants / needs.Let’s start things off with why Sandy Bridge users will likely want to look very closely at Coffee Lake. Not only is this the first architecture that brings a 6-core, 12-thread CPU to the sub-$400 market but the various architectural improvements over the last half decade have enhanced performance in certain applications to impressive levels. There has been absolutely nothing revolutionary introduced by Intel since the onset of their Core series, content creators and other professionals will find an upgrade to Coffee Lake hugely beneficial. Everything from rendering times to photo manipulation speeds has been increased drastically over the i7-2600K and its ilk.The “maybe upgrade” part I talked about is for those who might not need massive performance uplifts in professional programs but rather folks who want to replace their once high end 2600K / GTX 680 gaming system with its modern equivalent. That means spending upwards of $1500 for a new processor, GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, motherboard and memory. When coupled with a powerful enough GPU, the i7-8700K was able to distinguish itself quite well from the i7-2600K, particularly if in-game fluidity is factored into the equation. More importantly, the 8700K is much better positioned to provide adequate processing bandwidth to the more powerful upcoming graphics cards whereas the i7-2600K already struggles to feed the GTX 1080 Ti.The problem with Coffee Lake is its price to performance ratio for gaming if you are on anything resembling a reasonable budget. The i7-2600K paired up with a GTX 1070 proved to be a very, very potent combination particularly at higher resolutions where it matched up evenly against the i7-8700K. I’ll even go out on a limb and recommend avoiding Coffee Lake unless you absolutely need the additional connectivity offered on the Z370 platform. The framerate uplift just isn’t there and the money you save could easily be put towards a better GPU….and an all inclusive vacation.Coffee Lake may be a real barn-burner for general applications but in gaming scenarios it is certainly not the best upgrade choice for your money. Right now that distinction falls to unadulterated GPU power. For a number of reasons, games just don’t need a modern processor and as holistic DX12 / Vulkan optimized games continue to roll out, that situation may become even more evident. While there is certainly a tipping point where either limited core counts or clock speeds will negatively impact framerates in a big way, it wasn’t reached within the somewhat limited nature of this article.This all brings me to what should be an obvious bit of advice: know what your potential upgrade will achieve or you could be spending money for nothing. Given the right set of circumstances, Coffee Lake or any current generation CPU can truly shine but they are costly and a complete system overhaul may not grant the results you were looking for.