Intel Core i5 2500K Linux Performance

The World of Padman game is not particularly exciting as a benchmark for modern CPUs, but as ioquake3-based games remain popular with many Linux users, its results were included. These games are CPU bound, especially with a GeForce GTX 460 graphics card using the proprietary NVIDIA driver. When looking at the performance of the Core i5 2500K with World of Padman at 1920 x 1080, its performance was slightly elevated above the stock Intel Core i7 970 "Gulftown" CPU and then obviously additional gains in the frame-rate were made when overclocking the Sandy Bridge hardware. In reality though these gains are not too beneficial because even with an Intel Core i5 750 the frame-rate at this resolution is nearly 400 FPS.

With something a bit more interesting, the 7-Zip compression test, the Core i7 970 with its six physical cores plus Intel Hyper Threading, was able to outperform the Core i5 2500K. The Core i5 2500K was delivering greater performance per-core, but the 7-Zip program was able to take advantage of all available processing cores on the i7-970, which was enough to put it in the lead. In this test, the Core i5 2500K performance was comparable to that of the Core i7 870.

When running the Parallel BZIP2 compression program, the Core i7 970 was still the forerunner even when the Core i5 2500K was overclocked above 4.00GHz.