Xeon E5450 vs. i5 6500 Surprising results?

[Jonathan Lemmens]

A few days ago I've built a new PC for a friend of mine and because this was the first Skylake CPU I got my hands on, I wanted to do some benchmarking. I soon noticed that in Cinebench this i5 6500 was performing very close to what my modded Xeon E5450 achieves. The specs:

PC 1:

i5 6500 CPU at stock 3.2-3.6GHz

ASRock H110M-ITX/acMotherboard

16GB 2133MHz DDR4 Kingston ValueRAM Memory

240GB Adata Premier SP550 SSD

 

PC 2:

Xeon E5450 OC to 3,9GHz (771-775 mod)

ASUS Maximus Formula II Motherboard

8GB 1066MHz DDR2 Corsair XMS Memory

120GB Kingston V300 SSD

 

I know I am comparing an overclocked "top of the line" PC from 8 years ago to a midrange PC of today, but still the results are surprising to me:

At similar clock speeds the i5 (left) performs about 20% better in Cinebench R15 than the Xeon (right), but with a mild overclock to 3.6GHz (the i5's turbo frequency) on the Xeon the difference drops to 4%. When I set the OC on the Xeon to 3.9GHz it outperforms the i5 by about 5%. 

 

This is just one benchmark and by no means a scientific experiment, but considering the fact that this Xeon is a 45nm chip from 6 generations ago, Intel's claim of a 10% IPC improvement between generations doesn't seem to be true in this case. I'm not saying one is better than the other and obviously there are differences like cache size, power draw, heat output and other features that I completely ignore in this comparison, but purely form a performance standpoint I would have expected more from the Skylake PC.

 

Let me know what you guys think, or if I made a mistake or overlooked something. 

[Bananasplit_00]

huh. cool results. would not have expected that seeing as the Xeon is around $50 here and the I5 $250, there are other features and stuff with the I5 but still, thats pertty cool. i first though the Xeon had hyperthreading but nope it dosent so this is really cool to see  

[Jonathan Lemmens]

12 minutes ago, DEcobra11 said:

Well, it's cinebench. And FX 8350 also scores higher than i5s

But I need to ask if you've intalled the proper drivers for your MB because that score is a bit lower than expected:

The result can be higher if using dual channel configuration or higher freq. RAM

 

The memory is running in dual channel, though it is only 2133MHz. I didn't know that RAM frequencies had that much of an impact in Cinebench.

But on the other hand the RAM in my Xeon PC is running at 1066MHz (1083 beacuse of the OC), two times slower and it's half the capacity. So shouldn't it then be even more surprising that my scores are so close? 

[Jonathan Lemmens]

1 minute ago, DEcobra11 said:

Just saying that Pic I posted is with single channel 2133 MHz

What I mean is that you've something crippling performance in that system (Background applications (steam, skype, your internet explorer, etc...) , some 1151 mbs have wonky support for W7 or needs recent chipset drivers)

I see.

I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 professional and I have the latest motherboard drivers installed but I'm still waiting for windows updates. Could that be it?

[Jonathan Lemmens]

So is the problem between W7 and the H110 chipset or just W7 and Skylake?