Gamer Pc Intel Core I7 7700

TechRadar Verdict

Its functioning gains may be small-scale, only the Cadre i7-6700K is definitely exciting on the overclocking front.

Pros

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

Cons

-
It's not a lot faster
-
Still merely 4 cores
-
Intel's product strategy has gone walkies

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

Instead, it's nonetheless some other Intel processor with four cores, 8 threads and a habit of bustling along at well-nigh 4GHz. Isn't that what Intel's tiptop processors for its mainstream platforms have looked like forever? In fact, it'southward the style things take been since the arrival of Sandy Bridge dorsum in tardily 2010.

Of grade, nosotros've been complaining about the glacial rate of progress at Intel for so long, you might expect this latest mediocrity to have us pondering the possibility of putting an end to information technology all past stringing ourselves up with SATA cables. After all, you could say the glacial progress comment is actually a bit kind. Intel has in fact backtracked in contempo years courtesy of silliness like dumbed downwards chip packaging and cooling, forth with overclocking that'south always more locked down.

So it's true, we're not exactly diddled abroad past this new chip itself. And yet it's however the well-nigh exciting mainstream Intel CPU for years. How so? Let's start with the basics, fifty-fifty if they are a bit dull.

Specification

The 6700K is 1 of two launch fries representing the new Skylake family 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, just 200MHz worth of Turbo boost. Why even bother?

Anyway, information technology slots into the new LGA1151 socket and thereby hooks into Intel'south new 100-series chipsets, the most notable of which for us performance junkies is the Z170, which finer replaces the one-time Z97. Graphics-wise, there's an Intel HD Graphics 530 core onboard, and thus non one of the fancy new Iris or Iris Pro solutions. Got that?

Whatsoever, Skylake is a 'Tock' in Intel's Tick-Tock chip development parlance and that ways it'due south supposedly an all-new processor design on an existing production node, in this case 14nm. Except nosotros've barely seen any of the kickoff 14nm fries, known as Broadwell, on the desktop and now Skylake is get for launch. Put simply, Intel'southward CPU roadmap has gone completely out of whack.

The other problem, when it comes to improving CPU performance, is that Intel's CPU engineers snaffled upwardly all the low hanging fruit long ago. Then they climbed the branches and grabbed everything else. And at present there's almost cypher left. Intel's CPU cores are outrageously optimised.

Benchmarks

Cinebench R15: 915
x264 video encoding (frames per second): 56
Memory bandwidth: 26GB/southward
Metro: Last Light (frames per second – minimum in brackets): 37 (23)
Shadow of Mordor (frames per second – minimum in brackets): 53 (37)
Project Cars (frames per 2d – minimum in brackets): 28 (27)
3DMark: 5883
Maximum overclock: 4.8GHz
Peak platform power consumption: 140W

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

The game benchmarks are arguably even less dramatic. At the kinds of resolutions that a adequately pricey flake like this is likely to find itself operating, the bear on of the 6700K is slim going on none. If y'all've got a fast Intel Haswell processor or an Ivy Bridge chip, hell mayhap even a Sandy Bridge chip, you probably won't feel much subjective departure with Skylake. It's just non a big enough stride forrard.

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

Current page: Introduction and functioning

Adjacent Page Overclocking

Contributor

Applied science and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, considering Jeremy (Twitter) is fond to both. Long-time tech journalist, former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent motorcar guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-automobile technology is about to go thermonuclear. No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And dangerous. Merely rather an explosive period of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.