Amd Ryzen 7 Vs Intel I7

TechRadar Verdict

Its performance gains may be modest, but the Core i7-6700K is definitely exciting on the overclocking front end.

Pros

+
14nm goodness
+
It'due south a flake faster
+
Intel has opened up the overclocking

Cons

-
It's not a lot faster
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Still only four cores
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Intel'south product strategy has gone walkies

Start the bad news. The all-new Intel Cadre i7-6700K – which pitches in at around $350 (about £225, or AU$475) – does not tear PC gaming a new one. It's not a render monster like none before. It doesn't take desktop number crunching to a whole new level. Bummer.

Instead, information technology's yet another Intel processor with 4 cores, eight threads and a habit of humming along at about 4GHz. Isn't that what Intel's top processors for its mainstream platforms have looked like forever? In fact, it's the style things have been since the arrival of Sandy Bridge back in late 2010.

Of form, we've been complaining well-nigh the glacial rate of progress at Intel for then long, you might await this latest mediocrity to have us pondering the possibility of putting an end to it all past stringing ourselves upward with SATA cables. Later on all, you could say the glacial progress annotate is actually a chip kind. Intel has in fact backtracked in recent years courtesy of silliness like dumbed down chip packaging and cooling, along with overclocking that's ever more locked downwardly.

Then information technology'due south true, we're not exactly blown away by this new chip itself. And yet it's yet the most exciting mainstream Intel CPU for years. How and so? Let's start with the basics, fifty-fifty if they are a bit boring.

Specification

The 6700K is one of two launch chips representing the new Skylake family of 14nm CPUs – the other is the Core i5-6600K. This i7 and its quartet of unlocked Hyperthreaded cores rocks in at 4GHz nominally with a 4.2GHz Turbo clock. Yup, but 200MHz worth of Turbo heave. Why even bother?

Anyhow, it slots into the new LGA1151 socket and thereby hooks into Intel's new 100-series chipsets, the most notable of which for u.s. operation junkies is the Z170, which finer replaces the old Z97. Graphics-wise, there'due south an Intel Hd Graphics 530 cadre onboard, and thus not one of the fancy new Iris or Iris Pro solutions. Got that?

Any, Skylake is a 'Tock' in Intel'due south Tick-Tock bit development parlance and that means it's supposedly an all-new processor design on an existing production node, in this case 14nm. Except we've barely seen any of the kickoff 14nm fries, known as Broadwell, on the desktop and now Skylake is go for launch. Put but, Intel'southward CPU roadmap has gone completely out of whack.

The other problem, when it comes to improving CPU functioning, is that Intel's CPU engineers snaffled up all the low hanging fruit long ago. Then they climbed the branches and grabbed everything else. And now in that location's almost nothing left. Intel's CPU cores are outrageously optimised.

Benchmarks

Cinebench R15: 915
x264 video encoding (frames per 2nd): 56
Memory bandwidth: 26GB/s
Metro: Last Light (frames per second – minimum in brackets): 37 (23)
Shadow of Mordor (frames per second – minimum in brackets): 53 (37)
Project Cars (frames per 2d – minimum in brackets): 28 (27)
3DMark: 5883
Maximum overclock: 4.8GHz
Peak platform power consumption: 140W

All this explains why our higher up benchmark results show such a minor uptick in raw CPU performance. It's all of 4% faster than the existing Core i7-4970K in Cinebench. Bleh. As for video encoding, you're looking at a 6% leap. Hardly exciting.

The game benchmarks are arguably fifty-fifty less dramatic. At the kinds of resolutions that a fairly pricey chip like this is probable to find itself operating, the touch on of the 6700K is slim going on none. If you've got a fast Intel Haswell processor or an Ivy Bridge fleck, hell possibly fifty-fifty a Sandy Bridge chip, you probably won't experience much subjective difference with Skylake. It's only non a large enough stride forrad.

We even institute that the weirdo chip that is the Broadwell Core i7-5775C has the edge in some game benchmarks, and that'southward probably thanks to the 128MB of eDRAM, something the new Skylake Ks lack.

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Contributor

Technology and cars. Increasingly the twain shall run across. Which is handy, considering Jeremy (Twitter) is fond to both. Long-time tech journalist, former editor of iCar magazine and incumbent automobile guru for T3 magazine, Jeremy reckons in-car engineering is about to get thermonuclear. No, not exploding cars. That would be silly. And unsafe. But rather an explosive menstruation of unprecedented innovation. Enjoy the ride.