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Skylake review thread

oatmeal said:
Hoping the iMac refresh has this so I can upgrade this year.
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I wasn't really considering an upgrade but this confirms there's little reason to upgrade from my 2500k for gaming.

Kind of crazy how little has changed in the last 4 years...
 
adamantypants said:
Sounds like lots of people have the upgrade itch in here. Instead of pouring $500 into a CPU/mobo combo just put that toward a GPU. The gains here are woefully low, but on the bright side we're all just saving money in the end. I might get one of these though, simply because I've been considering a switch to SFF PC.
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The hard part is we all want to upgrade our mobos, move on to DDR4, hell I want to do a full rebuild in mAtx. With these CPU's continually under performing there is just no incentive or gains to really do so. I'd like to get a new GPU also, but even the 980ti doesnt hit the specs I'd expect for an above $600 card. I'm hoping nVidias next gen GPU's will be the true 4k cards (and going by the memory talks we are seeing, its expected).

In all honesty this is all good stuff, as it keeps are parts lasting longer so less money out of our pockets, which means more money for actions, house upgrades and a new TV :D
 
Some reviews in case people are interested to take a read/look instead of just glancing through barebones OP. Especially in HardOCP's review it's nice to notice that Skylakes gaming performance scales upwards when using faster DDR4's. Most benches just run with slowest memories.
 
Man there's nothing more pathetic than seeing gamers celebrate because a new CPU doesn't greatly improve on the one they already have. No true computer enthusiast should ever be happy about that.
 
I remember when I'd buy a new CPU and motherboard every couple of years because Intel and AMD were pumping out processors that gave us double digit percentage increases in performance. These days, I have the same 2600K that I've had for the last 4+ years (only lightly overclocked at the moment), and only a 25%-ish performance improvement to look forward to if I jump onto the Skylake bandwagon. Support for DDR4 and other stuff from the chipset is far more interesting than the lackluster CPU gains, but I'm not sure it's worth spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade just for that.

Sadly, I think the main issues at this point are as much architectural and physical (you can only shrink the transistors so much) as they are complacency due to lack of competition. I'm not sure how you can actually go about fixing that.

shark sandwich said:
Man there's nothing more pathetic than seeing gamers celebrate because a new CPU doesn't greatly improve on the one they already have. No true computer enthusiast should ever be happy about that.
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In my case, I'm not celebrating at all. I've been disappointed for the last 2+ years about how slow CPU technology has progressed. I'd love to have a much faster CPU than my 2600K, but Intel hasn't figured out a way to provide it yet. I'm still likely to upgrade to Skylake, but not today. Perhaps by the end of the year.
 
the only real upgrade is the one to 6 cores (haswell-e), not a big difference between a 2600k and a 6700k unless you game at high resolutions like triple monitor or 4k when the pci-e 2.0 on the 2500/2600k will definitely bottleneck you
 
Welp, looks like I'll be trucking along with my 3570k a little longer. At least until the price drops a bit on the Skylake 6-core chips and DDR4 memory.
 
Arrage said:
It uses laptop components. Dunno. At least Macbooks have high quality components, reliability and super battery life. Can't think of the benefit of having an underpowered iMac for the premium price.
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Main benefit, besides saving space, is probably the quality of the screen. The 27" retina iMac has a 5K screen, for $2500. You can spend that on a 5K screen alone. Granted, as you said, you are driving it with a laptop GPU.
 
where does something like an i5-3570k slot in? That techreport only seemed to benchmark i7 skylake, not i5.
 
Seeing as how I'm still on a i7 950, I think I'll be picking one of these up (and a new mobo + DDR4 sticks) later this year. It shows its age in games like GTAV. It did surprisingly well with Arkham Knight, though lol
 
Shame, looks like I'll be keeping my 4.5 4960k for years to come.

Well at least until usb c becomes the defacto standard or something,
 
Ugh


Not sure I should be happy that my FX8350 will be enough for my gaming needs, for the forseable future.

Plus DX12 only adding to that lifespan?


Damn Gina.
 
I'm hyped as fuck to see OCing results from BCLK on non-K parts.
Tovarisc said:
I wonder, why people with i5 4960K OC's expected Skylake to crush it and to be obvious purchase as clear upgrade?
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I don't think that people did? Maybe they were hoping that Intel would all of a sudden break out of the Tick-Tock path. It's unrealistic, but yeah.
kinggroin said:
Ugh


Not sure I should be happy that my FX8350 will be enough for my gaming needs, for the forseable future.

Plus DX12 only adding to that lifespan?


Damn Gina.
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Bruh. The FX8350 is outclassed by first gen Core parts like the i7 8xx stuff. It's basically unusable if you're after 120/144Hz gaming.
 
mkenyon said:
I don't think that people did? Maybe they were hoping that Intel would all of a sudden break out of the Tick-Tock path. It's unrealistic, but yeah.
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Just seeing quite a bit of comments (reading few forums on Skylake atm) from 4960K owners either being borderline happy about Skylakes "bad performance" as it validates their upgrade somehow more or disappointed that Intel didn't blow the bank and give 25+% performance increase with Skylake over 4960K.

I just don't get that thinking. Skylake looks to be expected ~5% performance increase to previous gen while bringing platform upgrades and improvements. Gaming performance could have been better, but it will be interesting to see how "real life" gaming goes when people use 2600+ MHz memories.
 
mkenyon said:
Bruh. The FX8350 is outclassed by first gen Core parts like the i7 8xx stuff. It's basically unusable if you're after 120/144Hz gaming.
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Im at that processor so i ready for an upgrade, and it will help with my programming hobby projects faster compile times baby...
 
As far as we can tell, Intel calls the HD 530 graphics part of its 9th Generation (i.e. Gen9). We have been told directly by Intel that they have changed their graphics naming scheme from a four digit (e.g. HD4600) to a three digit (HD 530) arrangement in order "to minimize confusion" (direct quote). Personally we find that it adds more confusion, because the HD 4600 naming is not directly linked to the HD 530 naming. While you could argue that 5 is more than 4, but we already have HD 5200, HD 5500, Iris 6100 and others. So which is better, HD 530 or HD 5200? At this point it will already create a miasma of uncertainty, probably exaggerated until we get a definite explanation of the stack nomenclature.
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intel's hd graphic naming scheme is complete garbage. it's bad enough that before you had stuff like certain 5XXX level GPUs being lower level than some 4XXX GPUs even though it wouldn't necessarily appear to be the case after they used a new thousand level (2XXX, 3XXX) to indicate higher performance previously, now we have this three digit crap? ugh.

with any luck though these will show major gains over previous Iris parts and finally make a strong case for going Intel over AMD in the next console cycle by just using an Iris GPU and a i3-level CPU.
 
Arrage said:
It uses laptop components. Dunno. At least Macbooks have high quality components, reliability and super battery life. Can't think of the benefit of having an underpowered iMac for the premium price.
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We have 2 in our studio, plus a bunch of MBP. iMacs are not underpowered at all, pretty awesome desktops.

I know hating apple is cool but there is a reason even enterprise is switching to Mac nowadays.
 
Brawndo Addict said:
I'm still on a old OC'd Lynnfield processor and I still go back and forth between upgrading my CPU and getting a G-Sync monitor.
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What Lynnfield you have? I'm rocking i5 750 @ 3,8GHz and now upgrading to i5 6600K. 750 had good and long run, but its time has come to end.
 
I have a 3770K and I'm just debating jumping on for the chipset features. M2, USB 3.1/C, and other features.

Probably will wait now until Pascal drops and upgrade then. Just buy a GSync monitor in the meantime I guess.
 
Etnos said:
We have 2 in our studio, plus a bunch of MBP. iMacs are not underpowered at all, pretty awesome desktops.

I know hating apple is cool but there is a reason even enterprise is switching to Mac nowadays.
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Which enterprises are switching to Macs?
 
shark sandwich said:
Man there's nothing more pathetic than seeing gamers celebrate because a new CPU doesn't greatly improve on the one they already have. No true computer enthusiast should ever be happy about that.
Click to expand...

I don't know why people are expecting huge gains in GPU limited benchmarks in the first place. In lower resolution tests where the GPU isn't a bottleneck, Skylake shows big gains (with good DDR4 sticks anyway). I'd like to see some subjective tests in MMOs, 64 player BF4 maps, etc. that would actually hit the CPU.
 
Tovarisc said:
What Lynnfield you have? I'm rocking i5 750 @ 3,8GHz and now upgrading to i5 6600K. 750 had good and long run, but its time has come to end.
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Holy crap I thought I was the only one. I'm waiting for mine to die after so long though.
 
Tovarisc said:
I wonder, why people with i5 4960K OC's expected Skylake to crush it and to be obvious purchase as clear upgrade?
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I don't know that anybody necessarily did, but as for why someone would, Skylake is supposedly 2 years and 2 generations removed from Haswell.
 
shark sandwich said:
Man there's nothing more pathetic than seeing gamers celebrate because a new CPU doesn't greatly improve on the one they already have. No true computer enthusiast should ever be happy about that.
Click to expand...

My PC is fucking fast as shit and I'm saving a lot of money here. But, I understand what you're saying.
 
I am moving current i7 2600 into a micro atx cube machine to be my VR demo Unit as lugging a full size atx machine isnt easy and my laptop GPU isn't supported any more for oculus.

So skylake my desktop for me
 
wildfire said:
Zen physically can't. AMD promises 40% IPC improvement over Piledriver.

That still puts them behind Haswell by 15% at best. AMD have yet to deliver on their promises since the bulldozer disaster.

What AMD can offer with Zen is better price for performance and features. They can't come close to INtel's absolute performance in 2016/2017.
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Zen promises 40% improvement over Excavator, not piledriver, on 14nm.
 
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