Tweet
This one's been a long time coming. Last year, we reviewed Intel's Skylake-based Core i7 6700K and lauded its brutally fast gaming performance, where its combination of architectural improvements plus higher levels of memory bandwidth translated into tangibly faster, smoother gameplay. But what we didn't have was access to the existing Core i7 5820K - older generation hardware, but six full cores as opposed to the 6700K's four. To this day we've always wondered which was fastest - and how the monstrous, $1000 octo-core i7 5960X compared. Now, we have answers.On the face of it, the contest looks excessively one-sided. While the 5820K and 5960X are based on the last generation Haswell technology (dubbed Haswell-E), the X99 enthusiast platform is rich with high-end features. Not only does it have access to the latest DDR4 system RAM technology, it offers quad-channel functionality while Skylake sits at dual-channel. X99 also offers more PCI Express bandwidth, opening the door to full 16x bandwidth per card for three and four-GPU SLI/CrossFire configurations. For its part, Skylake splits bandwidth across two 8x channels when dealing with two graphics cards, with three-way set-ups limited only to high-end boards.
On paper then, it all looks very one-sided. More processing power, more memory bandwidth and more flexibility in accommodating more than one graphics card. It's not for nothing that the X99 platform is more expensive as an investment - four sticks of RAM are preferable and that ramps up the cost of entry, while motherboards are generally pricier too. However, Intel threw us a curve ball when it priced the Core i7 5820K. This six-core chip currently costs around £300-£320 - not that much more expensive than the i7 6700K. Indeed, in the first few months after the Skylake launch when availability was a real problem, the 5820K was sometimes even cheaper.
Read more…
More...