Skylake or Kaby Lake

[DukToxic]

If there is only a $20 USD difference between the 7700k and 6700k, would you say the Kaby's worth it? Or should i go for the Skylake? I will be OCing fyi.

[myselfolli]

It doesn't really matter, there's a slight clock boost on Kabylake, but you won't really notice it. I'd say just go for whatever is cheaper

[Skiiwee29]

Looking at reviews and benchmarks, Kabylake is honestly only worth it if you are doing heavy threaded tasks such as video encoding, CAD, etc... otherwise there is no difference in gaming performance outside the margin of error. 

[manikyath]

crappy lake (yes, i'm doing it) is <insert number here> % faster for <insert same number here> more money.

 

pick your poison

[rn8686]

There is practically no performance difference between them, its more if you want the new features that come with it and the Z270 chipset. 

[Paradine Sage]

1 minute ago, rn8686 said:

There is practically no performance difference between them, its more if you want the new features that come with it and the Z270 chipset. 

This lie needs to die in a fire.

 

Out of the box Kaby Lake clocks ~300 MHz higher than Sky Lake at the same power and heat. Without Turbo Boost the 7700k is 4.2 GHz while the 6700k is 4.0 GHz. Kaby Lake is a straight up 5% performance gain in the worst case right out of the box (and not touching any of the other features).

 

Now whether that performance difference has a real world impact on any given individual is a different matter as it depends a lot on the specific use case and the entire system.

 

But for twenty bucks you are much better off going for Kaby Lake. Literally don't eat lunch for two days, or skip Starbucks twice, and you have that difference. Would you take an across the board additional 2-3 FPS in your games in exchange for giving up two whole cups of Starbucks? Or two whole beers? Because that is the real world cost difference in the first world nations.

[rn8686]

1 minute ago, Paradine Sage said:

This lie needs to die in a fire.

 

Out of the box Kaby Lake clocks ~300 MHz higher than Sky Lake at the same power and heat. Without Turbo Boost the 7700k is 4.2 GHz while the 6700k is 4.0 GHz. Kaby Lake is a straight up 5% performance gain in the worst case right out of the box (and not touching any of the other features).

 

Now whether that performance difference has a real world impact on any given individual is a different matter as it depends a lot on the specific use case and the entire system.

 

But for twenty bucks you are much better off going for Kaby Lake. Literally don't eat lunch for two days, or skip Starbucks twice, and you have that difference. Would you take an across the board additional 2-3 FPS in your games in exchange for giving up two whole cups of Starbucks? Or two whole beers? Because that is the real world cost difference in the first world nations.

In certain scenarios yes, but in many cases the difference will be small (Especially when gaming). I agree its worth it for the CPU, but to me it seems a bit pointless if you dont buy a Z270 with it for the new features, which is of course more expensive than their Z170 counterparts. 

[Paradine Sage]

1 minute ago, rn8686 said:

In certain scenarios yes, but in many cases the difference will be small (Especially when gaming). I agree its worth it for the CPU, but to me it seems a bit pointless if you dont buy a Z270 with it for the new features, which is of course more expensive than their Z170 counterparts. 

You can stick a 7700k into a Z170 board if you already have one, and if not then your same level of Z270 board bought today means that you are paying maybe another twenty dollar premium

[rn8686]

1 minute ago, Paradine Sage said:

You can stick a 7700k into a Z170 board if you already have one, and if not then your same level of Z270 board bought today means that you are paying maybe another twenty dollar premium

I know you can, just seems a bit pointless to me (Especially if you were waiting for Kabylake). 

[Paradine Sage]

1 minute ago, rn8686 said:

I know you can, just seems a bit pointless to me (Especially if you were waiting for Kabylake). 

If you already had a z170 board then I would wait three or so months for the inevitable BIOS issues to be fixed and for the price premium to go away on the board if you cared about the money but if you are doing a new build then you may as well just spend the few extra bucks and be done with it.

 

Now yeah, if you were saving a hundred plus between the motherboard and CPU then it might be a different story but when you are talking 50 bucks across both combined? About the only thing in your build that you would be able to improve with those free dollars is ram. Graphics cards tend to be hundred plus dollar price jumps, relevant storage increases tend to price around the same, if you are OCing either to any relevant extent then you should already be spending 80-120 on cooling (minimum) whether you are going air or AIO, monitor price jumps tend to be upwards of hundred dollar increments as well.

 

If the OP was like "here's my projected build, here's my use case, and I have X as a very strict budget" then it might be different but a strict performance/dollar comparison shows that you should go with Kaby Lake over Skylake as your default.

[DukToxic]

21 hours ago, Paradine Sage said:

If you already had a z170 board then I would wait three or so months for the inevitable BIOS issues to be fixed and for the price premium to go away on the board if you cared about the money but if you are doing a new build then you may as well just spend the few extra bucks and be done with it.

 

Now yeah, if you were saving a hundred plus between the motherboard and CPU then it might be a different story but when you are talking 50 bucks across both combined? About the only thing in your build that you would be able to improve with those free dollars is ram. Graphics cards tend to be hundred plus dollar price jumps, relevant storage increases tend to price around the same, if you are OCing either to any relevant extent then you should already be spending 80-120 on cooling (minimum) whether you are going air or AIO, monitor price jumps tend to be upwards of hundred dollar increments as well.

 

If the OP was like "here's my projected build, here's my use case, and I have X as a very strict budget" then it might be different but a strict performance/dollar comparison shows that you should go with Kaby Lake over Skylake as your default.

Thanks, I think I'll go for the Kaby plus the Z270 then. Totally new build, nothing reused. I wasn't purposely waiting for Kaby Lake but I might as well.

[App4that]

Kabylake carries higher clock speed, more downstream lanes, Octane, the list goes on and on. 

 

Why the people saying Kabylake isn't an improvement can't spend the 30 seconds of research to find out it is before posting is beyond me. Or how it's not against the forum rules to mislead people so badly.

[typographie]

1 hour ago, App4that said:

Kabylake carries higher clock speed, more downstream lanes, Octane, the list goes on and on.

It doesn't hurt to point out those features for the OP to judge, but most of them are very, very niche. You can't be terribly surprised that not everyone is aware of or cares about 4 extra chipset PCIe lanes or Optane support. Z170 has 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes to Z270's 24, that's already more connectivity than the vast majority of buyers will use.

 

For $20 more, I'd probably take the 7700K myself. But to keep things in perspective, the difference is on the order of 6-7% with a best-case overclocking scenario. That's analogous to going from Haswell to Skylake, or deciding between an i5-6400 vs. i5-6500. I'm not saying that isn't worth $20, but its useful to quantify that $20 as buying a chance at a 7% performance difference if they OP isn't concerned about the extra chipset features.

[App4that]

5 hours ago, typographie said:

It doesn't hurt to point out those features for the OP to judge, but most of them are very, very niche. You can't be terribly surprised that not everyone is aware of or cares about 4 extra chipset PCIe lanes or Optane support. Z170 has 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes to Z270's 24, that's already more connectivity than the vast majority of buyers will use.

 

For $20 more, I'd probably take the 7700K myself. But to keep things in perspective, the difference is on the order of 6-7% with a best-case overclocking scenario. That's analogous to going from Haswell to Skylake, or deciding between an i5-6400 vs. i5-6500. I'm not saying that isn't worth $20, but its useful to quantify that $20 as buying a chance at a 7% performance difference if they OP isn't concerned about the extra chipset features.

Yeah but people are advising to go with an older platform without listing any advantages. Worse they flat out lie.