Intel pulls wraps off Skylake-S desktop processors at Gamescom 2015

The 14 nm based Skylake Intel Core i7-6700K and the Intel Core i5-6600K can now be purchased from unofficial Australian Ebay retailers for 9.99 AUD and 9.99 AUD.

Otherwise, the core improvements in Skylake benefit the whole range, and with this launch the improvements should be even greater than we’d normally expect.

Skylake is the successor to the chipmaker’s Broadwell architecture, and was first put on the radar at Intel’s Developer Forum last year when the firm previewed the chip, touted to deliver significant increases in performance, battery life and power efficiency.

Skylake is a Tock, an architectural redesign for improved performance and additional features, built on the same 14nm manufacturing process as Broadwell.

Intel Hyper-Threading Technology: Allows each processor core to work on two tasks at the same time for up to 8 total independent tasks (threads) providing the parallel processing capability for better multi-tasking with threaded applications.

All MAINGEAR gaming PCs now can utilize the Intel 6th Generation Core processors.

The new chipset has received some upgrades too. We’ve seen signs of the benefits of this 14nm process in Broadwell laptop processors, such as in the new line of Apple MacBooks, as well as the new Core M chip design, which has brought a new level of performance to the ultra low-power laptop market, as seen in the Asus Zenbook UX305. Instead, the new 6-generation CPUs use the new LGA1151 socket, meaning you’ll need to buy a compatible motherboard to pair with it. Value-oriented H170 boards will be arriving later in the year, but high-end users, gamers and overclockers will be more at home with the premium Z170 chipset.

As such this review really boils to the two announced chips and what they can do.

The processors are expected to launch within the week and they will ship with three years of warranty from Intel. From the leaked images of the box window, it is now confirmed that Core i7-6700K will be an 8-threaded CPU (with 4 physical cores, and 4 HT cores), whereas Core i5-6600K features just four physical cores. The Z170 now supports up to 10 USB 3.0 ports, as well as PCIe Express 3.0 1×16, 2×8, or 1×8 and 2×4. If you’re looking to make a video encoding rig or run multiple graphics cards then they’re still the best bet, but for more general goal use with a single graphics card, Skylake is the way to go. The two desktop chips are clocked at 4GHz and 3.5GHz, respectively, across four cores. It has a TDP of 91W and over 8MB of cache on-board, 256K of L1 (64K per core), 1MB of L2 cache (256K per core), and 6MB of L3, which is a similar cache hierarchy to Ivy Bridge.

The Intel Core i7-6700K’s full specifications are listed above.