Hardware Intel Skylake: Intel Z170 Chipset and Core i7-6700K Review

Wow, pricey! The i7 doesn't make much sense when you can get a 5820K for less and it has more cores. I know X99 motherboards are more expensive than Z170 but still, doesn't make sense to me as an option.

 

wouldn't mind seeing how much quicker this is over a 1366 970/990

 

worthless, pointless, worthless, pointless, worthless.....

 

I know there's an element of early adopter gouge built in... but expensive chips are expensive...

Looks like I'll be making do with my 3258 for the forseeable...

 

Despite the gains..... I still can't justify the upgrade for that price. I need more cores AND a 20% IPC gain.

 

£200 for an i5... gouge the other one!

 

its day0 pricing - RRP seems to be coming in at £260 or so for the i7

 

Pretty much what harle said on price. It's averaging high overclocks and looks to be a decent upgrade from older platforms.

 

Sorry if a stupid question but why are there no gaming benchmarks at 1440p and 2160p?

Aren't these the current resolutions for enthusiasts?

 

Because it isn't a GPU?

 

Why not use games like Crysis 3 (welcome to the jungle grass areas) Dragon age inquisition or the Witcher 3? in my experience Bioshock and Alien Isolation are very CPU light compared to these.

 

Hopefully we'll see prices come down a little bit soon, but I suspect it'll all depend on availability. At the launch prices, these seem a little bit steep, but should they drop a little then it'll be happy days.

 

A couple of things here:

The i5 buying link links to the i7 on Overclockers and the price for the i5 can also be lowered to £185.99 (also eBuyer).

I am a little confused by the current prices as eBuyer has then at the same or even slightly lower than their Haswell counterparts while other etailers have them priced for significantly more, £320 (Scan and Overclockers) for the i7 for example. I am assuming this might be down to current stock levels?


'According to Asus, this was due to thermal reasons as initial testing meant Skylake was running a little hotter than Haswell despite the smaller manufacturing process, but it also added that this is likely to be removed with Skylake's predecessor.'

Shouldn't that be successor at the end?

Bioshock Infinite benhcmark:
'We use the handy in-built benchmarking tool to run a timedemo from two sections near the start of the game. However, we've found the game-generated results to be unreliable, so use FRAPS to record the frame rate over a 40 second sequence of gameplay during the second test.

Use should be 'used'? (x2)

Performance Analysis:
'What to make of SKylake...'

Uppercase 'K' in Skylake.

ANYWAY!!!....

Another very good article, thanks. It is obvious that if one is buying/building a complete new machine then Skylake is the way to go although I would suggest waiting for prices to come down, both on the RAM and CPU front. If a machine 'needs' to be built now then Haswell is still a good option is funds can't quite stretch to the level of Skylake.
The i5 may be £30 more than the Sandy Bridge equivalent at launch but even £150 is expensive for what is the mid-range CPU, even if it is unlocked. However, I don't think this is Intel 'bumping' up the prices due to AMD's lack of competition, but much more to do with the global economy and also all the technical issue Intel faced to get to 14nm. The days of the £115 Q6600 are very much long gone...

 

Looking at this, while people are saying it's not a worthy upgrade, for some one like me on Z77 I5 3570k it would make a worth while jump to this or X99. I've still got some older stuff running 775. X58 1366 would be a big jump on that

As has been said many time before the massive gains once seen won't be happening again unless some one comes up with a totally one architecture, or manages a way to do something spectacular with the current stuff.

AMD tried it with bulldozer and didn't manage it and mean while Intel are just creeping forwards.

Look back to what we had 10 years ago (which isn't long really) and to what we have now, that includes GPU's and the gains are massive.

The reality of it all is that You've all been spoiled .

That was a rather constructive rant from me... That doesn't happen often.

 

Are these significantly faster, for equivalent core count and clock speed, than an original Core i7 series?

I have a core i7 950 and without going to Xeons or six cores the difference seems frankly to be in the details

P

 

OK, maybe I am being a bit thick here but are there any plans to test/benchmark the CPU's iGPU? It would be great to compare it with something like the 750 Ti.

 

I've been putting my pennies away for a while to upgrade to Skylake. I was hoping for about 40% speed increase core vs core so am really disappointed with around 25%. I thought maybe all these 5% and 10% speed increases would have all added up by now.

On the flip side of the coin I suppose I should be happy I keep the money in my bank for a bit longer On another note, a story of tortoise vs the hare when it comes to AMD and Zen might be on the cards? - Best not to hold out too much hope on this one either.