Intel Core i7-6700K And Z170 Chipset Review: Skylake For Enthusiasts

Name: Intel Core i7-6700K and Z170 Chipset Review: Skylake For Enthusiasts
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, November 22, 2015, 08:00 AM EDT

Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and ensured the memory speed was set to each platform's maximum, officially supported memory speed and no CPU overclocking was taking place.

Corsair DDR4 Memory Installed In The ASUS Z170-Deluxe Motherboard

The solid state drives in the test systems were then formatted, and Windows 8.1 Pro x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed all of the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, let the system reach an idle state, and then we ran the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Intel and AMD - Head To Head

System 1:
Intel Core i7-6700K
(4GHz - Quad Core)

ASUS Z170-Deluxe
(Z170 Chipset)

2x8GB Corsair DDR3-2666
(@ 2133MHz)

GeForce GTX
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

System 2:
Intel Core i7-5775C
(3.3GHz - Quad Core)
Intel Core i7-4790K
(4GHz - Quad-Core)

MSI Z97 Gaming 7
(Z97 Chipset)

2x8GB AMD DDR3-1866
(@ 1600MHz)

GeForce GTX
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

System 3:
Intel Core i7-3770K
(3.5GHz - Quad-Core)
Intel Core i7-2700K
(3.5GHz - Quad-Core)

MSI Z77A-GD65
(Z77 Express Chipset)

2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1600MHz)

GeForce GTX
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

System 4:
Intel Core i7-3690X
(3.33GHz - Hex-Core)
Intel Core i7-3820
(3.6GHz - Quad-Core)

Asus P9X79 Deluxe
(X79 Express Chipset)

4x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1600MHz)

GeForce GTX
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

System 5:
AMD FX 8150
(3.6GHz Eight-Core)
AMD FX 8350
(4GHz Eight-Core)

Asus CrossHair V Formula
(AMD 990FX Chipset)

2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1866MHz)

GeForce GTX
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2015

Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2015, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite with Intel's new Core i7-6700K processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds (4.0GHz base, 4.2GHz turbo), with 16GB of DDR4-2133 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the ASUS Z170-Deluxe motherboard.

Processor Arithmetic	Processor Multi-Media
Memory Bandwidth	Cache and Memory Bandwidth

The Core i7-6700K put up some decent scores in the various SiSoft SANDRA tests, but we didn't see any big surprises. The arithmetic and multimedia scores are in-line with expectations, though memory bandwidth falls in the 27GB/s range, thanks to the platform's higher-clocked DDR4 memory. The cache and memory benchmark also shows a significant improvement in latency with larger block sizes, which hints at some of the architectural improvements we're sure to hear about at IDF.