Intel Core I7 8550u Kaby Lake

TechRadar Verdict

Its functioning gains may be pocket-sized, but the Core i7-6700K is definitely exciting on the overclocking front.

Pros

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

Cons

-
It's non a lot faster
-
Nevertheless just four cores
-
Intel'south product strategy has gone walkies

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

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

Of grade, nosotros've been complaining about the glacial rate of progress at Intel for so long, y'all might look this latest mediocrity to take us pondering the possibility of putting an end to information technology all by stringing ourselves up with SATA cables. Afterwards all, you could say the glacial progress comment is actually a fleck kind. Intel has in fact backtracked in recent years courtesy of silliness similar dumbed down flake packaging and cooling, along with overclocking that's ever more locked downwards.

And so it'south true, nosotros're non exactly diddled away past this new chip itself. And nevertheless information technology'southward however the most exciting mainstream Intel CPU for years. How and so? Let's first with the basics, even if they are a bit irksome.

Specification

The 6700K is one 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 heave. Why fifty-fifty bother?

Anyway, it slots into the new LGA1151 socket and thereby hooks into Intel's new 100-series chipsets, the most notable of which for united states of america operation junkies is the Z170, which finer replaces the erstwhile Z97. Graphics-wise, there'due south an Intel Hard disk Graphics 530 core onboard, and thus non one of the fancy new Iris or Iris Pro solutions. Got that?

Whatever, Skylake is a 'Tock' in Intel's Tick-Tock chip development parlance and that means it's supposedly an all-new processor design on an existing production node, in this case 14nm. Except we've barely seen any of the first 14nm chips, known as 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 performance, is that Intel's CPU engineers snaffled upwards all the depression hanging fruit long agone. Then they climbed the branches and grabbed everything else. And now there'due south near nothing left. Intel's CPU cores are outrageously optimised.

Benchmarks

Cinebench R15: 915
x264 video encoding (frames per second): 56
Retentiveness bandwidth: 26GB/south
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
Peak platform power consumption: 140W

All this explains why our above benchmark results bear witness such a modest uptick in raw CPU performance. Information technology'southward all of 4% faster than the existing Cadre i7-4970K in Cinebench. Bleh. As for video encoding, you're looking at a half-dozen% bound. Hardly exciting.

The game benchmarks are arguably fifty-fifty less dramatic. At the kinds of resolutions that a fairly pricey chip like this is likely to find itself operating, the bear upon of the 6700K is slim going on none. If you've got a fast Intel Haswell processor or an Ivy Bridge chip, hell peradventure fifty-fifty a Sandy Span flake, you probably won't experience much subjective divergence with Skylake. It's just not a big enough pace forward.

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

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Contributor

Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall meet. Which is handy, because Jeremy (Twitter) is addicted to both. Long-time tech announcer, one-time editor of iCar magazine and incumbent car guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car engineering is about to get thermonuclear. No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And dangerous. But rather an explosive catamenia of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.