Intel launched the Core i7 2600k in January, 2011 along with the other 2nd gen Core i7's. That time it was considered as a High End or Flagship CPU and was more powerful than any CPU except the 2700K which was just a bit more powerful. Even though it offered really good performance, it was way too costly and costed about $300 to $400 which not everyone could afford and it was purchased by only wealthy people and heavy multi-taskers. Now, today in 2020 when many new CPU's have been launched which are cheaper and offer more performance, should you consider buying this old beast?
The i7 2600K is based on the Second Gen Sandy-Bridge Micro-Architecture and comes with 4 Cores and 8 Threads means, it has Hyper-Threading and Flagship CPU's always have Hyper-Threading because they are supposed to do extremely heavy tasks. It has a Base Clock of 3.40 GHz and can be Overclocked up to 3.80 GHz. It is based on 32nm Process Technology and has the L3 Cache of 8 MB. It has a TDP of 95 W, so it draws a lot of power. It can be paired with any motherboard which has LGA1155 socket and some motherboards with LGA1155 are H61, z77, B75M and many more.
It can hold up to 32 GigaBytes of DDR3 Memory ( some motherboards can only hold up to 16 GB so it depends from motherboard to motherboard ) and up to 1333 MHz Frequency can be supported.
The Core i7 2600k also comes with an integrated graphics which is the HD 3000, it is a weak and low power consumption Graphics with Base Frequency of 850 MHz and Dynamic Frequency of upto 1.35 GHz. This IGPU is just made for display, it would not be able to do any gaming properly. The Core i7 2600K has been discontinued now, so you can not get a new Core i7 2600K and also it costed more than $300 ( Intel do not drops the prices of old CPU's ) but you can easily get a used Core i7 2600K from any used market for as cheap as $50 or something. The motherboard and RAM can also be found for very cheap in used market but would it be worth buying it now? That's what we are going to find today.
The Core i7 2600K which is not Overclocked is paired with dual channel 16 GB DDR3 RAM @1333 MHz ( the CPU supports only upto 1333 MHz, i have 1600 MHz ok ) and for the graphics card we have an AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB ( this will cause bottlenecks in games so go lower than that ). Cinebench R15 and 5 games are tested on ultra settings @ 1920x1080p reolution and results are down below.
The Core i7 2600K scored 123 scores in single core benchmarks which is okay if you want to play latest games at 30-45 FPS at normal settings. It scored 606 scores in Multi Core Benchmarks which is nearly equivalent to AMD Ryzen 3 2200G and is also okay if you do not need to do extreme multi tasking but it can do normal streaming due to its extra Threads. It performed pretty well in games with not much bottleneck ( the results may differ if the CPU is Overclocked ).
I the end it pretty okay for today's standards incase of performance but it takes a lot power supply and gets heated easily and it don't comes with a cooler fan. even though it provides ok performance but it ruins everything. Now today many new CPU's have been launched which cheaper and better than it, If you do not get it for somewhat like $30 to $50 then it is not worth now.