Gadgetory

hey Ronna i am steve from gamers nexus donna and today we're looking at intel's new skylake platform and the codename skylake cpus this includes the core i7 6700 k and the core i5 6600 k which take on more familiar naming to the older generations intel has presently dropped the XX 70 brandon as in the 4770k and the 6700 k is effectively the replacement to the 4790k The Devil's Canyon chip which was an overclocked replacement to the 4770k now in between those was another chip called Haswell refresh so Intel released three different versions of Haswell with similar SKUs for the last two years or so and this is very uncharacteristic of Intel they generally sort of put out their top-of-the-line flagship for any particular architecture in this case has well and then they just let it sit they put out a couple by threes i fives in between they might put out a new II platform like haswell-e Ivy bridge-e so forth but this time there were two refreshes in between Haswell refresh and Devil's Canyon and then there's the shift to skylake architecture so this is the new architecture and also uncharacteristic of Intel and somewhat odd for the industry is the coinciding release of Broadwell which has been discussed for quite a while now a number of years and that's finally here as well but today we're looking at skylake the more interesting platform in my opinion skylake has ddr4 and ddr3 support and this is something that until this point has only been offered on x99 platforms so ddr4 may feel a little bit stale for this reason because it's been around now it's in x99 but this is actually an important advancement for intel on the consumer side because skylake is a little bit more affordable than the x99 offerings including the five hundred and thousand dollar CPUs the 59 30k 59 60 X so ask I like the memory capabilities include both ddr3l and ddr4 that means that at the motherboard manufacturers discretion they may choose one of those two platforms for memory and put it on the board our board used DDR for there are ddr3l boards out there as well and those will bring cost down considerably for users who are considering the option of skylake CPUs so let's go through the specs of the i7 6700 K&I 560 600 K before we get into the gaming benchmarks the core and thread count is the same as previously you've got four cores eight threads for the 6700 k that means it is hyper threaded and the 6600 K has four cores four threads so it is not hyper threaded the 6700 K is clocked at four gigahertz and the 6600 K clocked at 3.5 gigahertz pretty familiar to the 4770 and 4670 and then of course the X 90 versions of those Devils cannon were clocked a little bit higher so there is more of a game there less of a difference between skylake and DC then skyleigh can as well the IGP is the HD 530 something we haven't yet tested I will be doing a separate article and video on that when we have the graphics drivers properly installed they were not installed in time for launch unfortunately but it is the HD 530 and then the TDP is slightly increased over Haswell base at 91 watts so very minor increase but this is in step with Devil's Canyon and it basically means that there's more G's provided to allow for the higher clock rate which is what we see in skylight so the new chipset for the skylight platform is z170 there will very likely be more chipsets there's normally an H series and only other Z series options as well as the device and platform and everything matures but right now it's z170 and that's what we tested on z170 has a couple of major additions again the first big item on note 4 the architecture of the CPU and the support of the chipset is ddr4 memory and this has a hidden cost to it so although the cpus are priced very similarly to what they were in the past for their succeeded skews the added cost of ddr4 can drive the price of a build up considerably depending on what you're building and and how much you're looking to spend on your memory the next biggest change for z170 is the increase in peace Express Lanes so z1 70-plus skylake offers a total of 36 PCIe lanes those are all 3.0 and to put things into perspective the previous Haswell offerings with the z97 z87 chipset were limited to just 24 lanes and some of those were PCIe gen 2 so this is actually a pretty big deal because at 24 lanes you can't get a full dual GPU by 16 setup going now for things we'll discuss in future videos that's not super relevant because the GPUs really won't saturate that full bandwidth anyway they'll be just fine at by 8 but you can't get the dual by 16s and perhaps more relevant is a dual GPU setup + + SSD using a PCIe slot or PCIe lanes which is done through the MDOT - SSDs that are out now they generally consume four PCIe lanes sometimes by 4 and sometimes by 2 so when you have a setup like that you're instantly exceeding the Lane availability of has well and z87 z97 with skylake at 36 lanes you could have 2 by 16 video cards and a by 4 SSD and you'll be consuming all the lanes but you will be fine and probably won't have to multiplex really at all or at least not heavily if you do and then if you're doing a three-way GPU setup it's again pretty allowing in that regard because you can do by by by 4 and then you can even have another device or by 16 by 8 by 4 whatever and you can have another SSD in there and you're not going to run into the lane issues that you would have on Haswell so that is a big deal but it's something that will test separately in a very in-depth article and video on the lane scalability of skylake systems the final update here is that USB 3.0 has 4 more native supported ports for z170 so not a big deal but that brings it up to 10 from 6 on z87 z97 there are other architectural changes as well but check out the article for that and let's just dive straight into the gaming benchmarks here first of all this system is our test bench for skylake now to test the other CPU we obviously had to use other benches because of the platform difference so the benches are detailed on the website there were three used AMD the Intel z97 option and then the z170 option here this is the more interesting one to talk about this was provided by iBUYPOWER it's a full system we'll be reviewing separately but the cpu in here is an i7 6700 K it's got a z170 chipset on an asrock k6 fatality motherboard which I think we have another video online discussing that motherboard and then we've got some memory in here as well it's got 16 gigabytes of G skills new ddr4 memory so this was provide by iBUYPOWER and it was our test platform we do not currently have a 6600 K but that is something I will be investigating in the immediate future for the GPU this used a gtx 980ti which is something we used in our 7870 k benchmark recently the a-10 APU benchmark and the reason we're using this GP is because it's our fastest single GPU solution without going to a Titan X and that means that we're hopefully forcing more of a cpu bottleneck in these benchmarks because we're really desperately trying to avoid a GPU bottleneck when we're looking at CPU performance in games the rest of the test methodology is described on the website let's get to the benchmarks here this test strictly looks at gaming that performance will visit the power thermals and overclocking stuff in more detail later there is almost no measurable gain over a Haswell Devil's Canyon or even the aging 35 70 K Ivy Bridge CPU and that's shown here in most of these games in grid there's a slight gain for skylake in the witcher and actually shadow of Mordor there's an interesting disparity where most of the time and any time outside of margin of error we found that the Haswell chips performance better than skylake for the the a thread model so why does that happen well it's actually sort of interesting it's because of the ddr4 memory so even though we have increased the bandwidth for ddr4 and increased capabilities for people like video editors you do actually lose some ground in latency and that's because the cast timings of ddr4 are significantly slower than ddr3 this is not really to memory this happened when we moved from ddr2 to DDR 3 as well DDR wanted a year two things slow down as bandwidth increases but hopefully you get something that outweighs it now in the case of these tests the difference between the ddr4 and ddr3 performance is so minor that it is almost immeasurable we had to run the test about 10 times in order to collect enough data to be confident that there was in fact a disparity and that's just that's how small the difference was it was one FPS or less on average and the reason for that is the cache timings on this g.skill memory it's about 15 for the slowest timing and on ddr3 or might be closer to 9 so that's actually a pretty big difference in terms of percentage Delta for the millisecond latency and that's where I believe we're seeing this difference because that will impact IPC and things like that which some games that are more heavily dependent on memory will exhibit this this outcome which shadow of mordor is one of them and certainly the witcher 3 is one of them now it's not too critical because the difference again is pretty small but it's something interesting and fun to talk about so I wanted to bring that up moving on to the other games that you see that for the most part there is really no measurable advantage for skylake over the recent CPUs all the way down to Ivy Bridge I do not have a Sandy Bridge CD for testing unfortunately overclocking was limited but we have engineering samples so I'll have to retest this as we update the BIOS the firmware things like that and get it all up to production level bios so hopefully that will increase our overclocking abilities but you can see on this chart the achieved overclocking output in our testing I was limited to about 4.6 gigahertz on skylake really not super impressive I think it should be more but I'm skeptical of the pre production board and CPU so we'll update these engineering samples and hopefully get some retail samples and then I'll let you guys know via video and article how it over clocks in the full version overall skylake is not a bad CPU just like Haswell was not a bad CPU iberia just not a bad CPU but none of them are particularly impressive in the face of their immediate predecessor and that remains true with skylake so skylake these 6700 K is stand-alone it could CPU it does what it should do it's fast and there's really not much of a downside against the previous generation but it's also not a huge advancement in terms of raw gaming performance so if you are on Sandy Bridge Ivy Ridge has well Devil's Canyon has well refresh then there's really no reason to jump from same skew it's the same skew on skylake there's no reason for you to go from a 2700 K to his 6700 K for the most part if you're just gaming if you're doing production tasks then it becomes more desirable because now you've got ddr4 and you have more lanes and for production heavy systems that is certainly something that is worth considering but for gamers if you're on has well Ivy Bridge whatever Sandy Bridge then jumping to sky lake will not produce a really measurable gain in your gaming performance you might get a couple of FPS at very best but the money would likely better be spent on something else like gen SSD or a better GPU or something like that the thing with skylake is that it's got ddr4 memory and that's a hidden cost so that's the one area where I would advise system builders working on a new computer to either look at a sky like ddr3 option or some other CPU basically platform but if ddr4 cost isn't a concern to you if you think you'll get use out of it then certainly skylake is really not a bad implementation of that x99 is going to be faster if you're using the high-end x99 chip with ddr4 for production tasks because you've got quad channel you've got the ddr4 memory as this has and then you've also got the additional lanes of a production class CPU so for premiere users Photoshop users people like that who are doing this professionally working with these applications batch processing all day long then x99 it should still be your go-to if it is within budget but if you're more of an enthusiast hobbyist then skylake is not a bad way to go so that is all for this skylake review check the article for full details and the description below and then I'll be back shortly with over talking with an AMD APU review of the 7870 k it's already published on the website if you want to jump ahead of me and check that out and then we've got some other front articles that were working on as well especially those with lane scalability and GPS which is more of my specialty as many of you know so check out our patreon page if you like this kind of coverage it really helps us to build that audience on patreon because we're trying to lessen our dependency on advertisers and traditional advertising but only if you really like what we're doing here so check that out and I will see you all next time