Skylake Basics: New Socket, New Chipsets
In an unusual move, while the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K are indeed the first chips that are being released with Intel's new 14nm "Skylake" architecture, Intel is holding off on sharing much in the way of details about that architecture for a later date. On a possibly related note, Intel's Developer Forum, or IDF, is happening later this month...
CPU Performance
We started our testing of the Core i7-6700K with our CPU-centric trials. Our comparison chips were the aforementioned Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" and Core i7-4770K (both 4th-Generation "Haswell" chips), the more recent 5th-Gen "Broadwell"-based Core i7-5775C (which has lower clock speeds but way more muscular Iris Pro graphics), AMD's two top ch...
Cinebench R15
In Cinebench R15, an industry-standard benchmark test that taxes all available cores of a processor to measure raw CPU muscle, the Core i7-6700K was left behind by the $1,000 Core i7-5960X (no surprise there) but managed a healthy-enough edge over the Core i7-4790K, and the rest of this pack… That said, the difference between the Skylake chip and t...
NES 10.6 Conversion Test
We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a single CPU core, as much legacy software does. Music encoding doesn't exactly push a modern CPU to its limits, and certainly not one like this. But this test still illustrates that for older programs and those that haven't been writte...
Windows Media Encoder
Next up was our very, very well-aged Windows Media Encoder 9 video-conversion test. We continue to use this test and report its results because, like the iTunes test, it gives a window onto performance with legacy software that isn't fully threaded. Here, we render a standard 3-minute-and-15-second video clip to a DVD-quality format... Most recent ...
Brake 0.9.9
These days, our traditional Handbrake test (run under version 0.9.8) now takes less than a minute to complete with high-end chips. (It involved the rendering of a 5-minute video, Pixar's Dug's Special Mission, to an iPhone-friendly format.) So, we've switched to a much more taxing (and time-consuming) 4K video-crunching test. In this test, we switc...
Photoshop Cs6
Next up, in our Photoshop CS6 benchmark, the Core i7-6700K looked even better, once again finishing first among other recent high-end CPUs. In this test, we run a series of 11 filters, in sequence, on a labs-standard high-res photo, timing how long it takes the system to render the effect. While the Broadwell-based Core i7-5775C and its Iris Pro gr...
Ray 3.7
This was the last of our CPU-centric tests. Using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing. Here, once again, the Core i7-6700K looked good against AMD's FX chips, and it shaved about 13 percent off the times of the recent Intel Broadwell a...
Overclocking
Early processors in Intel's Haswell 4th-Gen desktop line did not have great reputations as overclocking candidates. As a result, Intel made a fairly big deal about its improved thermal interface (between the die and the chip-top heat spreader) with 2014's Core i7-4790K Devil's Canyon CPU. Even so, we (and most reviewers) achieved middling-at-best r...
Is the Core i7 6700K a good CPU?
The biggest draw of the Core i7-6700K, Intel's first sixth-generation CPU, isn't the performance. Rather, it's the extra PCIe lanes that come with the supporting Z170 chipset, which may mean storage that's as fast as the processor. Matt is a self-described Net nerd, gadget geek, and general connoisseur of off-kilter culture.
Will i7-6700k & i5-6600k have a 14nm 'Skylake' architecture?
In an unusual move, while the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K are indeed the first chips that are being released with Intel's new 14nm "Skylake" architecture, Intel is holding off on sharing much in the way of details about that architecture for a later date.
What is the memory size of the i7-6700k?
Memory Support: Max. Memory Size: 64 GB (DDR4-1866/2133, DDR3L-1333/1600 @ 1.35V) Other names: Intel (R) Core (TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz, Intel Core i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz From submitted results to PerformanceTest V10 as of 31st of March 2023. From submitted results to PerformanceTest V10 as of 30th of March 2023.
Is Intel Core i7-6700k better than Intel 'Devil's Canyon'?
But after we installed Intel's very latest GPU drivers, the Core i7-6700K's performance here improved greatly, and it shaved close to two minutes off the time of the Devil's Canyon chip, for an improvement of roughly 14 percent. The Core i7-6700K also finished about 12 percent ahead of the Broadwell-based Core i7-5775C. Nice.
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