Gadgetory


All Cool Mind-blowing Gadgets You Love in One Place

Intel Core i7-6700K: Skylake Benchmark Review

2015-08-05
hey guys welcome back to hardware unboxed I'm your host Matt and today we're taking a look at Intel's later 6th generation Core i7 6700 K CPU it seems a bit odd introducing you guys to the 6 gen core i7 when just a month ago we introduced the 5th gen i7 for the very first time as it turns out Broadwell is just a stepping stone of the 14 nanometer design process and due to complications with the manufacturing process the series never really materialized a lengthy delay in rolling Broadwell out meant it became right on the heels of skylake Intel's brand new 14 nanometer tech we're Broadwell is essentially a hazard die shrink skylake is an updated microarchitecture that brings with it a new socket and support for ddr4 memory as you might have guessed the new socket means that sky like won't be compatible with motherboard sporting a 9 Series chipset although the 1151 socket isn't backwards compatible with house all CPUs you can still use your LGA 1150 CPU cooler as the location in the mounting holes remains unchanged the introduction of ddr4 and intel's mainstream platform means high memory frequencies can now be achieved though it is interesting to note that ddr3 support still exists therefore it's likely the budget boards using the be 150 chipset for example might use more affordable ddr3 memory at this point I should also mention the skylight features a dual channel memory controller today Intel is taking the covers off to new skylake processors the core i7 6700 K and the core i5 6600 K while other six generation CPUs are expected to be released later this year it's to Google for Intel to kick things off with their fully unlocked enthusiast processors as these models generate the most high for this video we'll be checking out the core i7 6700 K although we do also have a video on the more affordable Core i5 6600 K so be sure to check that out next the core i7 6700 K operates at the same 4 gigahertz base clock is a 4790k the only difference is in the maximum turbo frequency that's been capped at 4.2 gigahertz whereas the 4790k can clock as high as 4 point 4 gigahertz like our previous course of processes the 6,700 k is a quad-core process of supporting hyper-threading which means it's up to 8 threads available the 6700 K receives the same 8 mega by l3 cache is the 4790k and the PCI Express configuration is also the same this means guys still features 16 PCI Express 3 lanes so a single GPU can connect to the CPU at a 1 by 16 configuration while a two-way crossfire SLI will use the 2 by 8 configuration Intel claims that the 6700 K will deliver up to 10 percent better performance when compared to its Haswell counterpart the 4790k that isn't a significant claim for a revamped architecture and we hope to see reasonable improvements in most of our tests that being said let's get right down to it first up we're taking a look at the Cinebench scores in the multi-threaded test the 6700 case got a disappointing 5cb marks less than the 4790k these results are disappointing because both processors operate at similar frequencies and it shows a lack of improvement in instructions per cycle the single-threaded results were much the same though for whatever reason the 6700 K was consistently faster by a small margin eating out the 4790k by 6 eb marks in our tests next we tested with what I assume is pronounced web export which contains 6 html5 and JavaScript based workloads the results were much in line with those who saw and Cinebench underwhelming performance is very close to both the 4790k and the 5775 see again in our Excel test we see very similar performance to the i7 4790k this time was slightly slower again I guess Intel meant it when they said up to 10% better performance when compared to its Haswell counterpart there was no surprise of redemption in the 7-zip benchmark with the 6700 KS growing 8 percent less than the 4790k the Photoshop results are quite disappointing for the new 6700 K with our custom workload taking more than 2 seconds longer than the 5775 C and the 4790k again beating it out finally the 6700 top our table coming in a whole frame faster than the 4790k yep that's an entire frame per second probably nothing worth writing home about now it's time to take a look at the integrated graphics performance which we aren't expecting too much from but hopefully there is some improvement in BioShock Infinite we're pleased to see the 6700 K beta at the 4790k by a decent margin don't get me wrong it's still slow and if these low settings the game looks like rubbish but at least the performance is better the performance didn't compare however to the IRS performance of the 5775 C hitman absolution was quite similar however the 6700 K did manage to rein in iris Pro a little it was also 5 frames faster than the 4790k game which was good to see in Tomb Raider the 6700 K was quite a way ahead at the 4790k a 14 frames per second advantage however it was well behind iris Pro on the 5775 C which managed to compare ibly massive 97 frames per second these integrated graphics scores aren't bad for the 6700 K and there was slight improvement over the 4790k however they're most likely pretty irrelevant since anyone affording a flagship processor is probably not looking to play these games without a discrete graphics card next up we tested performance with the GeForce GTX 980 running the same games at the max quality settings in BioShock expectedly the 6700 caged performance was exactly the same as its rivals is this is a GPU bound game hitman absolution generally weighs pretty heavily on both the GPU and the CPU however at the settings we tested with the tends to be more GPU dependent as you can see from the results which are all very similar Metro Redux is heavy on the CPU and as you can see there's a noticeable difference between the 4690k and the 4790k and even more so to the AMD FX 8350 however if we look at the fourth fifth and sixth gen Core i7 processors we see no difference we used handbrake to assess power consumption and the results were slightly better than the 4790k consuming 10% less power so at least we're seeing an improvement in efficiency from this sixth gen processor well that was disappointing to say the least the 6700 K was no faster than the 40 790 and at times due to a 200 megahertz lower turbo frequency it was actually slower the years now entails been moving forward in baby steps jump from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge and edit around 10% extra performance at the time everyone seemed disappointed with such a minor performance bump but then has or came along the following year and only offered another 10% bump at best now we have skylake tattered is the biggest step forward since Sandy Bridge from what we've seen so far performance wise it's actually one of the smaller steps forward we've seen in a long time for a platform that calls in new tube sets and docks the latest memory technology will shock to only find 4790k like performance with virtually nothing changing in terms of CPU performance what can we possibly take away from this first look not much to be honest but we can say sky like does consume around 10 percent less power to deliver the same results something we didn't look at in this video is overclocking and I can confirm that our retail chip was an overclocking Beast hitting almost 5 gigahertz without much effort for those of you interested in finding out more about 6,700 k's overclocking abilities please check out our overclocking video other advantages can be found when comparing the z170 and z97 chipset the z170 connected to the CPU using the DMI 3.0 interface which enabled 20 PCI Express three lanes opposed to just 8 PCI Express 2 lanes for the z97 so in theory the Zed 170 should be better for multi-gpu setups the Zed 170 also supports 10 USB 3 ports whereas the Zed 97 was limited to just 6 price-wise the 6700 K is said to come in at the same 350 dollar MSRP is the 4790k which is good news but keep in mind that you also have to spring for a 100 series motherboard and ddr4 memory thanks for joining me for this first exclusive look at the 6700 K this has been Matt the hardware unboxed let me know what you think in the comments hit like hit subscribe and we'll see you next time yeah
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.