 CPU innovation is dead. How many of you feel this way? Like every time you upgrade your computer, you're saving 32 cents on your power bill this month and not getting better performance in games, creative applications, or even just general usage. Well, the thing about feelings is that they're difficult to quantify. So we gathered up every top Intel CPU from the last 10 years and put together an epic comparison for you. Performance, power consumption, thermals, and price. Is innovation dead? Is it more than a feeling? Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. G Fuel G Fuel is the sugar-free alternative energy beverage that helps you maintain focus and endurance over long days in gaming sessions. Use our code at the link below. Let's start with our testing methodology. We used the same video card on every platform. Even though the GTX 1080 wasn't even a twinkle in Jens Sunzai, when the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 was the king of the hill. We did this because we wanted the main variable to be CPU performance, rather than allowing this to turn into a comparison of the best overall systems through the years. With that said, DDR memory has gone all the way from 667 MHz dual channel to over 2000 MHz quad channel. So our compromise there was to use a high-end RAM and motherboard combination that would have been typical at the time. We went ten years back, and for every year, picked out the first Extreme Edition Intel CPU. Then for each one, we performed the following tests. Temperature under load, overall system power consumption in our Skybox Stair test, and we put it through a suite of modern CPU and gaming benchmarks. Though, since this project already had me tunneling into the dark recesses of my past, I was unable to resist benchmarking each CPU on Half-Life 2 as well. Using such old hardware presented a few challenges, not least of which was we had to use Windows 7 on all of our builds to ensure driver and game support. CPU Mark was the first test, and the results were very boring since they were just numbers on a spreadsheet. But then, I had John turn it into a graph. Ha, much better. While the multi-threaded results that use all of the CPU's cores show incremental performance improvements, the hidden story here is the single-threaded results, where we see Intel's current 10-core flagship, the 6950X, getting outperformed by chips going all the way back to 2011. In Y-Cruncher, a benchmark that calculates 50 million digits of Pi, we tested in multi-threaded mode, which gave us similar results to CPU Mark. Incremental improvements. Cinebench proved to be interesting, as I initially expected the results would mimic CPU Mark, but I was pleasantly surprised. The 6950X sat at the top as king in both multi-threading and single-core tests, with the oldest chip, a Pentium, on the bottom. Lucky dog. Onto our first real-world benchmark. Adobe Media Encoder again shows the older X79 chips with their higher single-core clock speeds, beating the 6950X in the more commonly used GPU accelerated rendering method. A video where we went more into this and why it happens can be found here. Each of the game benchmarks seemed to tell the same old story of incremental performance bumps. Rise of the Tomb Raider, our modern game engine representative, managed to scale through all generations, only slowing down when going from 8 to 10 cores. Crisis 3, representing an older AAA engine, improved very little past the i7-965, as it is not a very multi-threaded title. And then there was Half-Life 2, whose numbers don't show us much other than boring old incremental bumps. But here are the results for nostalgia purposes. So yes, for the most part, each chip performed better than its predecessor. But the margin of improvement from chip to chip shows a steady downward trend. Though I'm sure for some of you, this didn't come as much of a surprise. Intel has publicly stated their R&D is less focused on huge increases in processing power for consumer PCs, because they want to direct their attention to mobile, data centers, Internet of Things devices, and the cloud. So then, CPU power draw and heat output, which are very important to those markets, that's way down on newer products, right? Only sort of. At idle, power saving features have improved this dramatically. But when working hard, on the high end at least, Intel has settled into a thermal and power budget they're comfortable with, and they seem to be just adding more cores accordingly. So efficiency is up, that is, performance per watt. But your power draw while gaming will likely remain mostly unchanged. Let's look at pricing trends now. For an entire decade, a thousand US dollars, give or take, would get you the pinnacle of Intel consumer engineering. Not so anymore. They're asking a whopping $1,700 for their flagship enthusiast product. So, conclusion time then. Decreasing performance gains and increasing prices. The rational human in me might point at the collapse of Moore's law caused by the cost and difficulty of continuing to shrink silicon transistors, and Intel's design goals that have shifted to address growing markets rather than shrinking ones to explain this. But the conspiracy theorist in me noticed three things. One, after 2011, we stopped seeing large single core performance bumps from Extreme Edition chips, and after 2013, we stopped seeing tangible single core improvements in consumer chips at all. Two, the last time AMD had a CPU in competition with Intel for the high-end market was in 2008. And three, perhaps most incriminatingly, the Intel logo looks suspiciously like the eye of a reptile turned on its side. It's time for another Razer giveaway, and today it's all about the Kraken Pro and 7.1 V2 headsets from Razer. Both models include 50mm drivers, lightweight frames, a headband design for better weight distribution and less clamping force, larger interchangeable ear cushions that are softer and have better sound isolation, fully retractable unidirectional microphones, and the 7.1 features 7.1 virtual surround sound over its USB connection. It's got active noise cancelling and Razer Chroma lighting as well. We're giving away five of the Pros as well as one 7.1 as part of a six gaming bundle giveaway from Razer. Enter through the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or even consider checking out our affiliate code links to where to buy CPUs at Amazon in the video description. You can also buy a cool shirt like this one from our merch store or join our forum, which is freaking awesome. All that is linked down below. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, hit that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest through the ages or not latest, this is the latest, the previous one where we looked at CPU water blocks.