Today marks the public release of Intel's codename “Skylake-S” platform, a new 14nm microarchitecture designated for use in the company's newest line of CPUs. The Core series CPUs see accompaniment from a new Z170 chipset, found on each of the motherboards included in our Skylake Z170 board round-up. Skylake is targeted heavily at the PC gaming userbase, which is currently experiencing a heavy surge in platform adoption.
Intel's platform flagship is the i7-6700K ($350), sticking to the well-known 4-core, 8-thread approach by way of matured hyperthreading technology. Prior to Skylake, Intel shipped its Devil's Canyon update to Haswell, a worthwhile, same-price replacement with slightly bolstered clockrates. The “Haswell Refresh” CPUs have been mostly forgotten at this point, but were released in close proximity to Devil's Canyon. This string of same-generation releases is uncharacteristic of Intel, who generally launch the mainstay i7 and i5 for each architecture before immediately shifting gears to the next platform release.
The i7-6700K effectively replaces the i7-4790K (2014) in the stack, which replaced the i7-4770K (2Q13). The i5-6600K ($240)replaces the i5-4690K, which replaced the i5-4670K before it. The Skylake branding makes a return to what is more familiarized from Sandy Bridge, dropping the XX7X identifier.
We're going to be publishing various components of this CPU review in bursted increments. Our objective is to explore several individual facets in more depth (as it relates to video graphics, especially), and that will require more time than we were given before launch. This review is an initial analysis of hard gaming performance. Overclocking, power, thermals, PCI-e lane scalability, and more are forthcoming.
Today, we're reviewing Intel's Skylake i7-6700K CPU on the Z170 chipset; we've dedicated all of our efforts to gaming benchmarks to analyze FPS gain using the i7-6700K. The new CPU was pitted against other Intel models of recent years, including the 4770K, 4790K, and i5- models 4690K and 3570K. Production workload tests will be performed separately from this initial review and will release in the future. Our focus today is entirely on gaming and overclocking.
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