Intel Skylake: Intel Z170 Chipset and Core i7-6700K Review

Skylake Test Setup

We've revamped a lot of our test gear and benchmarks for our Skylake CPU and motherboard testing to bring them a little more up to date. Games are still a questionmark when it comes to Intel's mainstream setups - even X99 systems with two GPUs struggle to reveal much of a difference in performance so the difference in our single R9 390X-based system will be even smaller. We've chosen Bioshock Infinite as it's one of the more CPU-limited games we've seen, along with Alien: Isolation and Unigine Valley.

For the 2D tests, we've largely matched our X99 suite of tests, with PCMark's video and image editing tests, Terragen 3 and Cinebench R15 and finally idle and load power consumption. The latter shouldn't be taken as gospel as there's a mix of motherboard form factors as well as CPU sockets and memory, so a direct comparison is pretty much impossible.


In terms of hardware, our major upgrades for our future LGA1151 and Z170 testing are an XFX AMD R9 390X and 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2,666MHz Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory. There are plenty of quad channel kits around but seeing as Skylake only supports dual-channel memory configurations, it makes more sense to opt for a dual-channel kit. This particular kit retails for around £100 so is perfect for a new Skylake system. We've also updated to Windows 10 - so long as we don't run into any issues we'll continue to use it.

• 16GB Dual Channel Corsair Vengeance LPX 2,666MHz DDR4 RAM
  
• Intel Core i7-6700K
  
• XFX R9 390 DD 8GB
  
• OCZ 240GB ARC 100 Series (OS)
  
• Samsung 850 Pro (speed testing)
  
• Corsair H80i GT
  
• Corsair AX860i PSU
  
• Windows 10
  
• Microcool Banchetto K test bench

Thanks to Corsair for supplying the PSU, memory and CPU cooler, to OCZ and Samsung for the SSDs, to Intel for the CPU, to XFX for the graphics card and Microcool for the test bench.

Tests:

• PCMark 8 Video 4K encoding
  
• PCMark 8 Photo Editing
  
• Cinebench R15
  
• Terragen 3
  
• Alien Isolation
  
• Bioshock Infinite
  
• Unigine Valley
  
• Power consumption