i7 7740K and Asrock X299 Spotted – The First Kaby Lake X CPU and Motherboard!

AMD may have been out stealing a lot of thunder with their new motherboards and CPUs this month, but Intel isn’t exactly sitting on their hands doing nothing. We’ve already heard a few rumours of the upcoming X299 chipset, which will bring support for the Kaby Lake X and the Skylake X CPUs. Now we’ve got more information that highlights where these chips may sit in relation to the competition.

Why they’re using Kaby Lake X in an HEDT platform is a bit of an unknown, as it’s set to be a quad-core CPU, but it could be Intel looking to launch a high-performance, yet low-cost solution for this part of the market.

The Intel Core i7-7740K may sound like a refresh of the i7-7700K, but that’s no the case. The new chip will use the LGA 2066 socket, which means a new motherboard, and of course the new X299 chipset. The chip also drops the iGPU, bumps up the base clock another 100 MHz, and the TDP is up from 91W to 112W. The chip has been identified in the SiSoft database, where it was benchmarked in the ASRock X299 Professional Gaming motherboard.

Aside from the Kaby Lake X, you can also expect the Skylake X chips to follow shortly after, which will offer up 6, 8, and 10 core variants, so between Ryzen and the new X chips, the CPU war is about to kick up a notch and we can’t wait to see how this affects the prices of both.