Pc Asus Intel Core I7

TechRadar Verdict

Its performance gains may be small-scale, just the Core i7-6700K is definitely exciting on the overclocking forepart.

Pros

+
14nm goodness
+
It's a chip faster
+
Intel has opened up the overclocking

Cons

-
Information technology'due south not a lot faster
-
Still just four cores
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Intel'south production strategy has gone walkies

Showtime the bad news. The all-new Intel Core i7-6700K – which pitches in at around $350 (about £225, or AU$475) – does not tear PC gaming a new one. It'southward not a return monster like none before. It doesn't have desktop number crunching to a whole new level. Bummer.

Instead, it'south however some other Intel processor with 4 cores, eight threads and a habit of humming along at most 4GHz. Isn't that what Intel's top processors for its mainstream platforms have looked like forever? In fact, it'southward the way things take been since the arrival of Sandy Span back in tardily 2010.

Of course, nosotros've been complaining about the glacial rate of progress at Intel for so long, you might await this latest mediocrity to accept us pondering the possibility of putting an end to it all past stringing ourselves up with SATA cables. After all, you could say the glacial progress comment is really a fleck kind. Intel has in fact backtracked in recent years courtesy of silliness like dumbed downward chip packaging and cooling, along with overclocking that's ever more locked down.

So it's true, we're not exactly blown away past this new bit itself. And yet it's still the nearly heady mainstream Intel CPU for years. How and so? Permit'south start with the basics, even if they are a scrap boring.

Specification

The 6700K is one of 2 launch chips representing the new Skylake family unit of 14nm CPUs – the other is the Core i5-6600K. This i7 and its quartet of unlocked Hyperthreaded cores rocks in at 4GHz nominally with a 4.2GHz Turbo clock. Yup, merely 200MHz worth of Turbo boost. Why fifty-fifty carp?

Anyway, it slots into the new LGA1151 socket and thereby hooks into Intel'south new 100-serial chipsets, the most notable of which for us performance junkies is the Z170, which effectively replaces the old Z97. Graphics-wise, in that location's an Intel HD Graphics 530 core onboard, and thus not ane of the fancy new Iris or Iris Pro solutions. Got that?

Any, Skylake is a 'Tock' in Intel's Tick-Tock chip development parlance and that means it's supposedly an all-new processor pattern on an existing production node, in this instance 14nm. Except we've barely seen any of the first 14nm chips, known every bit Broadwell, on the desktop and now Skylake is go for launch. Put simply, Intel's CPU roadmap has gone completely out of whack.

The other trouble, when it comes to improving CPU operation, is that Intel's CPU engineers snaffled up all the low hanging fruit long ago. So they climbed the branches and grabbed everything else. And now there's almost cypher left. Intel's CPU cores are outrageously optimised.

Benchmarks

Cinebench R15: 915
x264 video encoding (frames per second): 56
Retentiveness bandwidth: 26GB/s
Metro: Last Calorie-free (frames per second – minimum in brackets): 37 (23)
Shadow of Mordor (frames per second – minimum in brackets): 53 (37)
Projection Cars (frames per second – minimum in brackets): 28 (27)
3DMark: 5883
Maximum overclock: 4.8GHz
Summit platform ability consumption: 140W

All this explains why our above benchmark results bear witness such a modest uptick in raw CPU functioning. It's all of 4% faster than the existing Core i7-4970K in Cinebench. Bleh. As for video encoding, you're looking at a 6% bound. Hardly exciting.

The game benchmarks are arguably even less dramatic. At the kinds of resolutions that a fairly pricey chip like this is likely to discover itself operating, the impact of the 6700K is slim going on none. If y'all've got a fast Intel Haswell processor or an Ivy Span chip, hell perchance even a Sandy Bridge flake, y'all probably won't feel much subjective difference with Skylake. Information technology'due south merely non a big plenty step forwards.

Nosotros even found that the weirdo flake that is the Broadwell Core i7-5775C has the edge in some game benchmarks, and that'due south probably thanks to the 128MB of eDRAM, something the new Skylake Ks lack.

Current folio: Introduction and operation

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Contributor

Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall encounter. Which is handy, because Jeremy (Twitter) is addicted to both. Long-time tech journalist, quondam editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car engineering is about to become thermonuclear. No, non exploding cars. That would be giddy. And dangerous. Only rather an explosive period of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.