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Intel Skylake: Core i7 6700K review

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  • Intel Skylake: Core i7 6700K review

    It's the flagship product in Intel's latest sixth-generation 'Skylake' line of Core processors. The i7 6700K represents the latest iteration of the firm's market-leading mainstream processors, following on from last year's superb Devil's Canyon i7 4790K. On the face of it, the 6700K is another in a long line of iterative improvements as opposed to a revolutionary leap, a further refinement on a formula that began in 2011 with the release of Intel's remarkable Sandy Bridge architecture, arguably the firm's last great generational leap in processor performance. But - as ever - Core remains the default CPU choice for gaming, and Skylake is the strongest iteration yet.
    But just how much stronger is it, and is it time to upgrade? As part of the research for this piece and our companion Core i5 6600K review, we sourced every major mainstream i5 and i7 CPU released since 2011. The bottom line is pretty clear - it may well be four years old, but Sandy Bridge, exemplified by the Core i5 2500K and the i7 2600K - absolutely remains a viable gaming platform. However, as we explained in the i5 review, we have now reached the point where the arrival of a new platform combined with smaller speed bumps across the years results in a product that's certainly worth considering as an upgrade.
    Many of Skylake's plus points aren't really aimed at the core gamer as such. There's a 40 per cent increase in internal PCI Express 3.0 bandwidth, but it's reserved almost entirely for the new wave of ultra-fast storage devices - PCIe SSDs get more robust support via the new Z170 chipset, and it's even possible to natively connect them together in RAID, resulting in phenomenal throughput. On top of that, the enhanced bandwidth also services the new USB 3.1 standard - which, on paper at least, is twice as fast as the existing USB 3. Many of the new Z170 boards - including the MSI Gaming Z170A M5 board we used for this review - come with both standard Type A connectors, plus a single Type C (the kind found on the new MacBook).
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