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Intel's new Skylake-X line-up demonstrates just how good competition is for the PC hardware market. In the wake of Ryzen 7's exceptional value, Intel has been forced to react. The impact of AMD's return to the market is ongoing but in the short term, $700 off the cost of a ten-core CPU and $400 off the sticker price of an eight-core chip is definitely a step in the right direction. On top of that, further adjustments to pricing may be required in the wake of the imminent arrival of AMD's Threadripper - a 16-core monster for 10-core Intel money.In the here and now, we're going to be looking at the four CPU key releases compatible with Intel's new Basin Falls enthusiast platform, all running on the new X299 chipset. The price to performance sweet spot comes in the form of the six-core Core i7 7800X - available for just £30/$40 more than Intel's mainstream, quad-core i7. There's a hefty jump to the $599 eight-core chip - the Core i7 7820X - and a significant leap again to the $999 ten-core Core i7 7900X.
Bizarrely, Intel has also released a quad-core part for the Basin Falls platform - the Core i7 7740X - which is, essentially, a slightly overclocked version of the existing 7700K and released under the Kaby Lake-X umbrella. Priced so closely to the 7800X, it has no real point on an enthusiast platform geared towards power users, its lack of relevance eclipsed only by the existence of an i5 version. Quite why these parts exist at all is a bit of a mystery: perhaps if you're looking towards a many-core upgrade path in the months or years to come, it might make sense to invest primarily in the platform. However, when surrounding aspects of an X299 build cost so much, the paltry extra £30/$40 required for the 7800X over the 7740X essentially destroys that argument.
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