Intel i7 6700K ES Skylake Pictured and Tested Again

While Intel may have some of the best CPUs around, they still can’t keep people from leaking information. Today we bring a series of tests done on an i7 6700K Engineering Sample which is compared to the i7 4790K, i7 5820K, and Xeon E3 1231 v3. The test platform appears to be a Gigabyte LGA1151 Z170 motherboard with DDR4 given the presence of a Turbo B-Clock module.

In synthetics, we see the 6700K pulling just ahead of he i7 4790K, besting it in 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Firestrike, though falling behind in Fritz. In single threaded tests like Photoshop CC and WinRAR 4.2, the 6700K and 4790K managed to place ahead of the 5820K though the 6700K score the same as the 4790K in WinRAR. As we’ve seen before, Skylake places just better in Cinebench R15.

In dGPU gaming, the i7 6700K manages to pull ahead of the other chips in every game tested. Generally, Haswell seems to hold its own pretty well, only losing by a few frames in GTA V, Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 4 and Metro 2033. A weird anomaly did appear in Project CARS, with the 6700K managing to push well past both the 4790K and 5820K. It will be interesting to see if the same results play out on release day and what are the exact reasons it does so well in that game.

Overall, the benchmarks show that Skylake will be very much an incremental upgrade on the CPU side of things. In some ways, the additional chipset PCIE lanes and other platform changes like the removal of the FIVR, improved iGPU and DDR4 are more interesting. Unless one needs to be on the bleeding edge of CPU power, there will be little need to upgrade for those on Sandy Bridge and later. You can find more of our Skylake coverage and other leaked benchmarks here.

Thank you PConline for providing us with this information