 There's an age-old question that gets asked all the time. Are all megahertz the same? Let's talk about that. The Cooler Master Novatouch TKL utilizes genuine Topar hybrid capacitive switches and is now available at a more affordable price. Click now to learn more. Good Tech Tips morning! I love GMM, but what we're here to talk today about is the myth of megahertz, not the awesome antics of RET and LINC. So let's set the stage. There are many things that will determine a processor's effective speed when handling tasks, but two of the most common ones are clock speed, which is a given, and IPC, also known as instructions per clock, which you'll hear a lot when it's thrown around as the banner of IPC improvements with every new processor launch. Right about now is when I'll get you guys to click on the box to go check out the fastest possible episode explaining IPC, but we don't have one as of yet, so what I would suggest is you check out the kind of somewhat rough Wikipedia article on the topic and other various sources. We'll try to get a video about that out fairly soon. IPC isn't necessarily just as simple as it sounds at first, but Intel claims generation after generation to have a usually around 10% general improvement. Does this improvement actually amount to anything? Wouldn't an old processor running at 2.4 gigahertz run just as well as a new processor running at 2.4 gigahertz? And even if the improvements do amount to something, will this show up in non-real-world synthetic tests only, or will it actually be noticed? Let's find out. The tools of the trade for today will be two different test machines. One will be Linus's Scrapyard Wars machine. If you haven't seen Scrapyard Wars, first of all I'm genuinely surprised, and second of all click here or something and then come back later. We will be using the Q6600, which is running in his system at 2.4 gigahertz, rocking four standard cores and no hyper-threading, alongside eight gigabytes of RAM and a freaking GTX 980 from Gigabyte WinForce, just to push the GPU bottleneck out of the way and see how effective the processor actually is at handling things. Our second system will be the standard GPU test bench machine with its smugly running 5960X, but today it won't be running normally. I've nerfed the 5960X down to 2.4 gigahertz and four cores with no hyper-threading to match the clock speed and core count of the Q6600. If you're interested in how core count can affect things, check out my recent video here on cores for gaming. Then I slapped eight gigabytes of RAM onto the bench and the same WinForce GTX 980 to even things up. In order to pit these two systems against each other, I picked a suite of seven different benchmarks, three different synthetics, and four games. I'll start up with a forum favorite and that would be Cinebench R15. Check out the awesome Cinebench R15 thread and other R's actually on the forum. As you can see, there's been a whopping 55% improvement. That's pretty huge, even given the seven-year gap between these two processors and with our new fancy new chip majorly nerfed just for this experiment. 3DMark and 7-Zip tests were fairly similar with the 5960X actually slapping around the old weary Q6600, but none of this was all that surprising. But it's time to move on to stuff that you're probably more interested. Real-world gaming performance. First up we have Tomb Raider which showed essentially no difference between the two. I really need to stop using Tomb Raider for anything other than GPU tests because it really doesn't scale with anything other than GPUs at all. Well, that story was boring so moving on. Next up we have Far Cry 4 which as we know from the Corsair gaming video isn't all that CPU bound unless you count not running on dual cores. But regardless, we do see a bit of an improvement here and that's nothing to scoff at. But this is where it starts getting interesting. Dying light. Fairly substantial difference in average fps between the Q6600 dipping all the way down to 15 fps at times for minimums and the 5960X holding a cool 25 fps for minimums. Also note that whenever there was a slightly more intense zombie action going on it would chug a bit and even crashed a few times on the Q6600. Not a great experience. Last of all and oh did I save the best for last is Cities Skylines. We just recently introduced this game into our testing suite and damn does it love processors. And it really shows here with the Q6600 there were stutters all freaking over the place. It couldn't run 4k and it was barely able to manage itself at 1080p and it was just a horrible experience. Meanwhile the 5960X was just chilling. No big deal. So in conclusion what does all this mean? Well I hope it helped to show how things can improve more drastically over time than most of the easy to read specs actually show. If you're already happy with your late gen processor you don't need to run out and replace it this second. It doesn't matter. There are always other things that you can do as well. Overclocking can help a ton and you can just not run all your games at max like we just did. That can help too. But if you are a speed freak and you've been struggling to figure out why your older overclocked processor isn't performing quite as well as your buddy's stock processor running at the same frequencies hopefully this will help. Speaking of better than dessert Crunchyroll. If you're a fan of anime and haven't signed up for Crunchyroll premium yet you should certainly give them a shot. Crunchyroll is a site created by anime fans for the other anime fans. They offer the most current episodes of new shows straight from Japan like Kuroko's Basketball 3 and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure as well as a large collection of the most popular anime shows like One Piece and Naruto. All professionally subtitled. If you head over to crunchyroll.com slash linus you can sign up for a 30-day free trial of Crunchyroll premium which is completely ad free. And if you enjoy many benefits of premium like 1080p streaming, getting new episodes of shows straight from Japan within an hour of their premiere, and being able to stream anywhere anytime from a variety of devices even your phone tablet or heck we you, you can continue your premium membership to Crunchyroll for only $6.95 per month. So head over to crunchyroll.com slash linus and check them out. Personally I'm quite a fan of my 5 GHz 2600k but it may be time to upgrade soon. Let me know what you think down in the comments down below or better yet over on the forums. While you're here like, dislike, favorite, subscribe, share, do all that kind of stuff, check the link in the video description down below to get a cool Linus Media Group shirt. There's a bunch of really cool ones and I actually have been running into people wearing them at conventions lately which is pretty sick. Over on the forum you can check out the support Linus Media Group link where you can do cool stuff like changing your Amazon affiliate code to ours that gives us a small kickback whenever you buy things and actually adds up to being really really helpful. Also if you want to become a contributor on the forum you can get a really cool little badge under your profile picture whenever you post things. Thanks for watching guys and I'll see you next time.