Intel Core i7 6800K Benchmarks On Ubuntu + Linux 4.8

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 26 September 2016 at 11:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 18 Comments.

While the Core i7 6800K has been available for a few months now, there hadn't been any review on it since Intel hadn't sent out any Broadwell-E samples for Linux testing this time around. However, I did end up finally buying a Core i7 6800K now that the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 support is finally coming together (at first, Intel PR said it wouldn't even be supported on Linux) so that I can run some benchmarks there plus some other interesting items on the horizon for benchmarking. Here are some benchmarks of the i7-6800K from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with the Linux 4.8 kernel.

The Core i7-6800K is a six-core CPU plus has Hyper Threading to provide 12 logical cores. The i7-6800K has a 3.4GHz base frequency, 3.6GHz turbo frequency, and with Turbo Boost Max 3.0 can hit up to 3.8GHz for a core. The TDP on this higher-end CPU is 140 Watts and supports DDR4-2400/2133MHz memory and is suited for LGA-2011 v3 X99 motherboards.

I picked up the Core i7 6800K last week for $430 USD. It's well supported under Linux but with the main limitation being no support for Turbo Boost Max 3.0. Those patches have yet to be merged to the mainline kernel nor is it clear as of writing if that support will be merged for Linux 4.9. Thus for the testing today off the Linux 4.8 kernel it's without the TBM 3.0 support, but in a follow-up article I will be testing this out-of-tree code. I'll also run some other i7-6800K follow-up Linux tests; if any Phoronix Premium readers have any particular test requests, please let me know.

For the Core i7 6800K Linux benchmarking I was using the recently-reviewed MSI X99A Workstation motherboard, which I would recommend for Linux/BSD users looking to utilize new v4 Broadwell processors and are looking for a nice motherboard. From this MSI X99 system with 4 x 4GB of RAM, GeForce GTX TITAN X, and OCZ Trion 150 SSD storage was a comparison to the Core i7 5960X, Xeon E5-2609 v4, and Xeon E5-2687W v3 CPUs as my other available LGA-2011 v3 processors. I also tested an AMD FX-8370 for some comparison on the red side.

Given the i7-5960X tops out at DDR4-2133, I tested the i7-6800K when running at the common DDR4-2133 speed as well as DDR4-2400MHz using the supported G.SKILL memory. DDR4-2400 is the highest stock rated frequency for this Broadwell-E CPU.

All tests for this initial i7-6800K Linux benchmarking was carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite software. Following these initial LGA-2011 v3 and AMD FX results are the CPU thermal and power consumption data.


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