Intel Skylake Core i7-6700K IPC & Overclocking Review @ [H]

From i7 920 (x58) in 2009 to i7 5820k (x99) 2015. I'm good!

Great review [H]
 
j0maK said:
Somehow every review I've seen (that includes the [H], along with Anandtech and bit-tech) suggests that it's now worth upgrading. Why am I not seeing the reason when checking out the benchmarks? Does anyone really care about synthetics?
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http://cdn.sweclockers.com/artikel/diagram/10350?key=0a416d7eb565e02c673d198a107ba606

Sweclockers' benchmark do show a difference. Certainly if you compare i7 Sandy to i7 Skylake. There was a substantial difference in Dragon Age: Inquisition, GTA V etc etc, as well.
Also, look at i5 Broadwell! And compare the minimums, especially.

What accounts for this difference between between Sandy and Skylake on i7 @ Sweclockers and sites like Anand which show almost nothing? I wish I had the answer. SweC state in their GTA V benchmark intro that they use the last fourth of the benchmark since it is especially CPU-heavy. Well, Anandtech states similar stuff.
 
Another quad core with very limited I/O and memory capabilities...way to push the envelope Intel....:rolleyes:

Maybe by 2025 they'll have an option for more than 4 cores available for the mainstream market...;)
 
lutjens said:
Another quad core with very limited I/O and memory capabilities...way to push the envelope Intel....:rolleyes:

Maybe by 2025 they'll have an option for more than 4 cores available for the mainstream market...;)
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Maybe by 2025, software developers will routinely use multithreading and make it worth having more than 4 cores.
 
Thank you for directly pointing out us i7 early adopters...

I REALLY REALLY hope that when I buy this, it doesn't disappear in 3 months like the LGA 1156 line....

I've been waiting for this jump a LONG time and now I have to build it out and see how much its gonna cost. What sucks is my current machine is having no issues (yeah I know first world problem), so I gotta figure out what I want to do with my "Old" system.
 
finrep said:
http://cdn.sweclockers.com/artikel/diagram/10350?key=0a416d7eb565e02c673d198a107ba606

Sweclockers' benchmark do show a difference. Certainly if you compare i7 Sandy to i7 Skylake. There was a substantial difference in Dragon Age: Inquisition, GTA V etc etc, as well.
Also, look at i5 Broadwell! And compare the minimums, especially.

What accounts for this difference between between Sandy and Skylake on i7 @ Sweclockers and sites like Anand which show almost nothing? I wish I had the answer. SweC state in their GTA V benchmark intro that they use the last fourth of the benchmark since it is especially CPU-heavy. Well, Anandtech states similar stuff.
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Oh, it's not just SweC. TechReport shows similar differences:

http://techreport.com/review/28751/intel-core-i7-6700k-skylake-processor-reviewed/8
It's more games than Civ, of course.

So there does seem to be a divide. Sites that show some discrepancy vs sites that show little to none.
 
finrep said:
http://cdn.sweclockers.com/artikel/diagram/10350?key=0a416d7eb565e02c673d198a107ba606

Sweclockers' benchmark do show a difference. Certainly if you compare i7 Sandy to i7 Skylake. There was a substantial difference in Dragon Age: Inquisition, GTA V etc etc, as well.
Also, look at i5 Broadwell! And compare the minimums, especially.

What accounts for this difference between between Sandy and Skylake on i7 @ Sweclockers and sites like Anand which show almost nothing? I wish I had the answer. SweC state in their GTA V benchmark intro that they use the last fourth of the benchmark since it is especially CPU-heavy. Well, Anandtech states similar stuff.
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These are still not compelling enough, considering that the average Sandy will be clocked ~300MHz higher than the average Skylake. 20% might be compelling for some people, but for spending all that dough for a new CPU, a new mobo and DDR4, I'd expect more than 20%.

For instance, if you see the GPU market, a 970 is around 50% faster than the 770, give or take. And this is just one generation, not 5 of them. Just imagine a 980 being just 20% faster than a 480, while in reality this number is over 200%.
 
finrep said:
http://cdn.sweclockers.com/artikel/diagram/10350?key=0a416d7eb565e02c673d198a107ba606

Sweclockers' benchmark do show a difference. Certainly if you compare i7 Sandy to i7 Skylake. There was a substantial difference in Dragon Age: Inquisition, GTA V etc etc, as well.
Also, look at i5 Broadwell! And compare the minimums, especially.

What accounts for this difference between between Sandy and Skylake on i7 @ Sweclockers and sites like Anand which show almost nothing? I wish I had the answer. SweC state in their GTA V benchmark intro that they use the last fourth of the benchmark since it is especially CPU-heavy. Well, Anandtech states similar stuff.
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Probably because Anandtech is using a 980 instead of a ti like Sweclockers.
 
TDSlam720 said:
This reminds me.. Dan_D or Kyle.. Is the memory controller on the CPU just better/more consistent than Haswell-E or is it built into the motherboards like you were eluding to? I know Haswell-E can hit those high memory bandwidths, but it's very much lottery. Skylake seems like it will be able to more consistently hit the 3000+ range, while maintaining a solid OC?
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Skylake seems to be a fundamentally better chip with improved IMC, 3200+ usually is the maximum HW-E can handle, still DDR4 wouldn't go prime until Skylake-E hits the market.
 
Yet another meager improvement over last generation.

Not really convinced to upgrade, will have to wait for Skylake-E, and perhaps see what AMD puts out with Zen. Good news it is a good time to upgrade storage devices, and monitors.
 
Thank you Intel for allowing my old 2600k machine to live on for another year or so until at least Skylake-E!
 
I honestly don't see a reason to upgrade from Sandy @ 4.5GHz in my gaming rig. After looking at lots of reviews, the differences at 1080p and higher with a single GPU just aren't significant. It's a box just for gaming with 1 SSD in it, so I don't feel that I'd benefit much from the Z170 platform much either.

Maybe whatever comes after Cannonlake?
 
MrMike said:
I honestly don't see a reason to upgrade from Sandy @ 4.5GHz in my gaming rig. After looking at lots of reviews, the differences at 1080p and higher with a single GPU just aren't significant. It's a box just for gaming with 1 SSD in it, so I don't feel that I'd benefit much from the Z170 platform much either.

Maybe whatever comes after Cannonlake?
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Eh check some of the review benchmarks from Sweclockers that Finrep pointed out

http://www.sweclockers.com/test/20862-intel-core-i7-6700k-och-i5-6600k-skylake/17#content

Seems compelling enough of a reason to me.
 
I was about to pull the trigger on a 6700K system and use some of my DDR3 to get me by.
But only the cheapest motherboards support DDR3 (apart from Biostar, they dont want to sell any though).
The overall cost will be close to £600 which will net me up to 10% extra framerate (where it drops below 60fps due to CPU bottleneck on a few games).
Sod that, I'm going to have a wild night on the town and still come back with £500 more lol.
I can then do a CPU lottery twice to see if I can get a higher clocker and still come out with cash for an Indian banquet for all my mates.

ps great review :)
But they are sooooooo expensive now and far far too little performance increase.
 
I'd say this: there's no point to getting Skylake on the desktop if you have something recent. However, it's still what I'd pick if I were upgrading from an old system or getting that first high-end gaming rig.
 
Great review Kyle! Has everything I wanted to about skylake in it. Thanks!
 
MrMike said:
Those are at stock clocks, and the difference will shrink further with more resolution. Some of the benchmarks on there show zero difference or even Broadwell beating Skylake, like Witcher 3.
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Yeah I'm kind of annoyed that no ones doing a clock for clock 4k SLI 980 ti comparison. That's the kind of thing I'm really interested in seeing.
 
So this is what happens when there's no competition. I guess the Conroe days will never happen ever again. But Sandy Bridge was damn good too, I'll say that's Intel's second best.

At this rate, it looks like I'll probably have to wait until 7nm before I upgrade. Fortunately I get to save more money.
 
@ Kyle

How was power consumption of Skylake in comparison to the prior election of chips?
 
so 2600 guys.. time to upgrade. 3930.. . you know i think i 'might' wait one more round.. or maybe Skylake-E (if there is one).
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Maybe i missed it, but when will these be available?
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Sounds like immediately, but [H] made a point of noting the projected stock levels Intel wanted weren't met, and that if you want one buy fast or expect to wait awhile (which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're worried about early adoption woes).
 
Vittra said:
Sounds like immediately, but [H] made a point of noting the projected stock levels Intel wanted weren't met, and that if you want one buy fast or expect to wait awhile (which isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're worried about early adoption woes).
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I've just checked every USA and Canada major etailer. Nuthin' yet...
 
2 generations and unless i'm missing something we are looking 5% improvement 4790k to 6700k.

I'm partially disappointed, but I also built a 4790k not too long ago. So it looks like I'll be sitting pretty for several more years. Figured I would max out a ddr3 system while they are cheap.

The only real difference I see that could justify the extra expense is if you wanted the 4 more pcie lanes for nvme or similar nand storage. I'm personally happy with my sata ssd's and haven't seen any gaming benefits from faster storage interfaces. I don't suspect my opinion on that will change in the next year or 2 though, but who knows.

Either way I'm pretty underwhelmed by cpu progress. They seem to have peaked out. With the silicon die shrinks slowing down now as well, I think this is the new norm now. Good news is the longevity of our platforms is increasing. Hopefully gpu progression doesn't follow suit. I still need more pixels and pretty effects in my games for the foreseeable future.
 
Not bad.

According to my calculations not worth upgrading from my 3930k@5Ghz quite yet though.

I focused on single threaded benches collected from reputed review pages, did some linear interpolations and averaged the percent increases for each and came up with the following:

i7-3930k vs i7-6700k in single threaded benchmarks

Stock-to-Stock: 33.14% average advantage to 6700k
clock for clock: 20.46% average advantage to 6700k
[email protected] vs [email protected] (likely OC): 10.82% Advantage 6700K
[email protected] vs [email protected] (Max OX): 13.23% Advantage 6700K

So at least there is a clear Max OC to Max OC advantage in this generation, but 10%-13% is not quite enough to make me upgrade quite yet. maybe in the next generation or two. For now Sandy-E is still sufficient.
 
So, what I am curious about is are there any negative impacts to SLI if you have once GPU in the PCIe lanes off the CPU, and once GPU in the PCIe lanes off the chipset?

In the past this was considered a bad idea, leading to stuttering and other problems, but it seems to be implied in many reviews that this is OK with Skylake, as the chipset PCIe lanes are better somehow.

Any thoughts on this?
 
its still a better upgrade from SLI 980s to SLI 980ti's

After reselling my signature it should only be a few bucks more for a huge bump after overclocked vs spending 500-600 bucks on new 980's ti in SLI. Could care less about 4k.

Skylake will also be a beast when it comes to running emulators
 
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I think that given the issues Intel has had with the 14nm process and the blink-of-an-eye that Broadwell was with us because of it, I'm fairly happy with these results myself. It could have been a lot worse. Raptors could have broken out of their paddock and a T-Rex could be wreaking havoc everywhere.
 
Wierdo said:
To me the I7-5775C is more interesting with its huge "Iris" L4 cache, seems to do generally better than Skylake in games when using a discrete graphics card, even with the 500mhz (ouch) disadvantage.

(source: http://techreport.com/review/28751/intel-core-i7-6700k-skylake-processor-reviewed/6)

Would be curious to see how well that model would overclock by comparison.
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If you can tell a 0.3ms or 1.3ms difference, you must be superman :p

I would argue that is in the irrelevant noise level.
 
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Maybe I missed it in the article, but when IS day zero for these then? I can't seem to find it anywhere.
 
I'll be fine on my overclocked 4790k for awhile until I really need PCI-E 4.0, USB C or native NVME
 
Zarathustra[H];1041776908 said:
If you can tell a 0.3ms or 1.3ms difference, you must be superman :p

I would argue that is in the irrelevant noise level.
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Well sure, it basically translates into a ~5fps difference in the 120fps range in these cases, the games are prbably not even CPU bound to begin with really. But still, that's with a full 500mhz disadvantage.

And in gaming the average FPS would not tell us how a giant L4 cache is hiding/leveling out pesky spikes, that's the most important thing for smooth gameplay anyway. Might not be a big deal in this game but who knows how that translates to future games that use DX12 with better CPU utilization etc. Could be a glimpse of future-proofing potential:

http://techreport.com/r.x/skylake/pcars-8ms.gif


I'm curious about overclocking potential because this model seems to be getting an interesting reputation/following as of late and I'm curious to see if there's indeed a hidden gaming CPU gem in there.

Does anyone know how well the 5775C model overclocks? If it can tighten the mhz gap to within a couple hundred mhz then it could be amusing to make a comparison.

But also it's funny to see an old obscure feature completely wipe out the IPC advantage of a newer architecture like that, it's not like the old days when a new CPU design meant double the performance and such.

Of course the ideal would be to have a Skylake desktop chip with this "sorta L4 cache" feature, not sure if Intel's planning to come out with another desktop CPU like that or not this time around. Hopefully they will.
 
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Think I'll stick with my 2500k a bit longer. I really want to upgrade, but I want a reasonable priced 6 core.
 
MemEx has then up for "preorder", price is decent though (considering how unbelieveably shite the Canadian dollar is right now).

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX58496

It's so depressing looking at the currency drop and wondering how much more I could have gotten for my money this time last year when DC launched.
 
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