Intel Core i5-7600K review published by Chinese tech site

[HEXUS]

Benchmarks show the new Kaby Lake chip performs about 10pc faster than an i5-6600K.

Read more.

[MarcelTimmer]

It looks like the same processor as the 6600k with higher baseclocks.

[Andy14]

Going to be interesting to see how this (and it's i7 relation) overclocks. Currently I'm waiting until Jan for the 7700K, Z270 and 1080Ti so I'm hoping there's similar headroom for the SCAN boys to clock this like the current Skylakes.

[this_is_gav]

So the new 7600K doesn't even beat the 6700K. I specifically didn't use the word "can't" there, as I'm sure if they wanted to they'd be able to sail past with the 7600K as well as the 7700K.

I realise that the 6700K has hyperthreading and is 0.2GHz faster, but these incremental releases are just frustrating now.

It doesn't bode well for Zen, as Intel will know where Zen is at, and yet they don't feel pressured enough to even do anything for their new chip over what they've done with every other incremental increase since the i7s of 2008 (which are still perfectly capable now). Eight years with pretty much sod all progress.

I've not been following any Zen rumours and I wasn't getting my hopes up for Zen, and expected it to slot in roughly where the 6600K is at stock, but even that looks like a distant hope now. I just want some competition, for someone to actually move us forward.

[MRFS]

I don't know Chinese: what's the "PCIe lanes boost"?

[DDY]

I don't know Chinese: what's the "PCIe lanes boost"?

I think that refers to the extra few PCIe lanes the 200 series PCH offers over the 100 series.

[Draylax]

I realise that the 6700K has hyperthreading and is 0.2GHz faster, but these incremental releases are just frustrating now.

I'm waiting for Zen to finally bring a decently priced competitive quad core cpu that isn't from the blue team just like next tech nerd but, I gotta ask this: do you upgrade you PC every year? Or more reasonably: do you upgrade every 2 years?

Because as far as I can see, unless this is what you do every single year or every other year, there is really no need to belly ache over 10% gains for every "generation" of Intel processors - over the average lifespan of the large majority of PC consumers' machines (which I would reasonably say is around 3-5 years...not counting upgrades here or there for the GPU or storage etc), these gains definitely add up.

And the last time I checked, clock for clock, even an i5 6600k is still one of the finest pieces of silicon engineering reasonable money can buy. Wanting performance boosts of 25% plus every single year simply shows you don't consider everything about growing technological limitations, software development to actually take advantage of said gains and yes, even the lack of competition from the Red team. It's simply not required with the fact that software development is far slower and just plain unsustainable over the long run.

By the way, if you do upgrade every year, apart from simply wanting to, what application does your PC perform that it completely needs more than 10% boost every year?

[this_is_gav]

I'm waiting for Zen to finally bring a decently priced competitive quad core cpu that isn't from the blue team just like next tech nerd but, I gotta ask this: do you upgrade you PC every year? Or more reasonably: do you upgrade every 2 years?

No of course not. The only reason I went from an i7 920 to an i7 4790K (some good sales on Black Friday last year and Skylake was certainly not worth the extra) was because I wanted more control over fan noise, and of course the software on decent modern motherboards allows this - my first such upgrade (other than graphics cards and hard drive/SSDs) for 7 years.

Hypothetically speaking if I could have slotted in my 920 into a modern motherboard I would have done so, as it's still a strong CPU.

And the last time I checked, clock for clock, even an i5 6600k is still one of the finest pieces of silicon engineering reasonable money can buy. Wanting performance boosts of 25% plus every single year simply shows you don't consider everything about growing technological limitations, software development to actually take advantage of said gains and yes, even the lack of competition from the Red team. It's simply not required with the fact that software development is far slower and just plain unsustainable over the long run.

Thanks for the condescending reply, but having been involved in the computer industry for 18 years I feel that I'm experienced enough in life to understand that silicon design is not a simple, steady path to oblivion, but it would be nice to see a worthwhile mainstream upgrade once in a while, as if we're actually moving forward.

Intel have plenty of upgrades available and they're charging what they want for them as they can, but I would have liked to think they'd to actually develop products that push the boundaries once in a while. We're pretty much on the same architecture that Core2 introduced, whereas before AMD and Intel were constantly reinventing new ways to leapfrog each other.

Of course I realise that the lack of competition means Intel don't need to push the boundaries, but what are they actually doing?

Long gone are the days where you'd buy into a new platform because it would, to all intents and purposes, run close to the absolute top-end processors. The £100-250 area that most of us have probably aimed for in the last 20 years (taking into account inflation) is now many, many cores behind those top-end chips, being many, many times slower in CPU-intensive tasks, and they're usually out of realistic range of us mainstream users who would benefit from them (let's say pro-am photographers and videographers). A grand for the only 8 core desktop Intel CPU. £1600 for the only 10 core! What happened to filtering tech down? Why is the £300 market still on 4 cores and not bumped up to 6 cores?

In the same time consider the monumental upgrades in graphics performance - of course massive game-changing gains aren't always possible, but nVidia and AMD have managed it with the silicon in graphics cards introducing new tech such as HBM, and ARM with their incredibly power-efficient mobile designs which aren't far off desktop performance.

At least with nVidia's Titan we had the GTX 950 and everything in between and next year the ~£200 mainstream cards may well leap-frog it.

When the i7s were introduced with Nehalem, the base for the current high-end mainstream CPUs, the nVidia 8800GT was the popular graphics card of choice!

What we've actually got is a ~20% gain over a 5 year gap since Sandy Bridge over the equivalent 7000 series and probably ~25-30% over Nehalem nearly a decade later. It's like they're designed to just do enough...

If you prefer to think of Core2 as the base for the current mainstream then you're looking at the X1900 era! I'm still using a Q6600 at work and it's perfectly fine, only showing its age when encoding large, high-res videos and opening 36MP RAW files.

[realnikb]

It'll be interesting to see how these perform against an i5-6600K that's overclocked to match it's clock speed so we could see these perform in a like for like environment.

I have a feeling they're going to be very close in terms of raw performance.

Also when is the NDA up for sites that don't want to incur Intel's wrath??