let's be honest with each other a lot of what we do in the do-it-yourself PC
Community is because we can and that's not always a bad thing especially if you
just want to throw in some sick looking lighting or something like that but
today we're talking about CPUs
specifically Intel's new Broadwell e Enthusiast line even though CPU cores
have become a little like cylinders in your city Only cruising sedans engine
where the only point in having a V12 is to say screw you I have 12 cylinders
Intel is hoping that its new top-end 10 core Behemoth with a price to match will
be a hit with those who need topend performance so let's take a look at it
and the rest of the Broadwell E Line and see if it's more than just a status
symbol for
techies the GTX 1080 amp extreme from
Zotac features their ice storm cooler with triple 90mm Eco fans for better
airflow and heat extraction check out the link below to learn more so it's
been almost 2 years since we've gotten a new line of Enthusiast processors from
Intel the main thing that sets these CPUs apart from their mainstream
Brethren is the inclusion of more cores and the inclusion of more RAM slots
Broadwell e is no exception the bottom two chips on the ladder the core i7
6800k and 6850k are each hexacore with
the ladder providing 40 PCI Express Lanes instead of 28 while the 6900k
features eight cores and 16 threads
meaning it's essentially a direct replacement for the previous Top Dog the
i7 5960x but if you want to go all out the
new chip sitting at the top of the Heap is the
6950x featuring 10 cores and 20 threads
the most that Intel has ever packed in tune in class CPU of course it shouldn't
be surprising that since Intel is trying to set 10 cores as the new gold standard
for desktops consumers will pay a hefty premium the chips MSRP is over
$1,700 enough to build an entire
high-end gaming rig with peripherals
that would be like pretty good and all you're really getting for the $600
premium over the roughly $1,100 6900k
other than the X in the model number that is important to some people are two
more cores and an extra 5 megabytes of cash and even then you take an overall
hit on clock speed now huge price jumps
for more cores isn't exactly new for
anyone but spending that much for two more cores when you're already at eight
and then taking a hit in the speed department is iffy especially at that
cost our best guess is that Intel priced at this High to keep part of their Z
online from being cannibalized by the high and core i7s as many zeeon SKS have
10 cores and will work on consumer grade
x99 motherboards but for the average home PC Builder how can anything
actually justify forking this much money over for well Broadwell e does come with
a cool feature where the core with the greatest overclocking potential as
determined by Intel at the factory is marked in the BIOS with an asterisk so
if you're running a heavily single-threaded application and want the
best possible performance you can overclock that core alone then in
Windows Intel turbo boost 3.0 will
automatically set the Affinity of that application to that core specifically
making optimizing performance for single-threaded programs pretty easy but
that alone won't get most of you to spend
$1,700 especially as these features are on all the Broadwell e SKS not just the
69 50x and even then why are you
optimizing for single core applications if you're buying one of these CPUs you
should probably be buying one of these CPUs for definitely multi-threaded
applications as in single core they don't do that great so speaking of which
let's talk about performance instead we benchmarked all four Broadwell e chips
on the x99 deluxe 2 from ASUS which
features their New Aura onboard RGB lighting for not only some cool effects
on the PCIe slots but also for the rest of your rig which is pretty cool as it
has a header to allow board lighting effects to sync with other case lights
you also get a u.2 and m.2 slots for
higher-end NVMe ssds and an extra four pin connector for additional CPU power
and USB 3.1 support including a type-c
connector the rest of our test bench consisted of 32 GB of Corsair Dominator
ddr4 an h100i GTX AIO a GeForce GTX 1080
Founders Edition and a Kingston hypx Savage SSD we tested the Broadwell E
Line against the previous generation 5960x as well as the current Skylake
core i76700k so we instead use the ASUS z170
Deluxe for the ladder right off the bat it's pretty fair to say that it's hard
to justify buying any Broadwell e chip
if your heaviest workload will be gaming as the $315 Skylake 6700k beat every
single Broadwell e skew in all of our gaming benchmarks including the flagship
6950x even in City's skylines which tends to be more CPU bound than many
other titles but of course that's not surprising it's been known for a long
time that CPUs with more than four cores see more utility on the content creation
side and with things like file compression or encryption here we see
more threads and cores benefiting in cinebench 7zip and h26 64 video
rendering as well as an Ida 64's AES
encryption Benchmark photo editing benchmarks were a bit of a mix bagged
however which Ida 64's Photo Works Benchmark favoring the higher core count
of Broadwell e but real bench's tests showed the Skylake 6700k pull
ahead on the single core tasks indeed
cine bench's single core Benchmark showed the 6700k well ahead of the other
four Broadwell e chips as well well but what about overclocking could cranking
up our clock speeds add more value to the Broadwell E Line we chose to
overclock the 6900k since it's the closest thing to a direct upgrade from
the older X Series skew we got our review sample up to 4.3 GHz or 300 mahz
over the stock turbo boost unfortunately there was a huge power and thermal
penalty as CPU cores shot up to 88° C
and we had to put 1 375 volts through
the processor to get it stable not exactly ideal since the last gen Haswell
E Series seemed to have a little more Headroom across the board performance
did increase notably in some benchmarks with the overclock but single core
performance still lagged behind our 6700k running at stock speeds so with
all of that said do any of these CPUs really make any sense no doubt there are
real scenarios like 3D rendering or really heavy encryption work where more
cores do matter but from a price to Performance standpoint the
6800k seems to make the most sense since you're only paying $120 more than you
would for a 6700k and get two extra
hyperthreaded cores and while it only has 28 PCI Express Lanes that might not
be as important as it used to be especially as NVIDIA is no longer
supporting more than two graphics cards in SL for gaming purposes and you'll pay
a hefty premium to upgrade to the 6850
K's 40 Lanes I'm talking almost another
$200 so while Broadwell e might be the ultimate thing for enthusiasts to drool
over right now I'd rather spend my money
on the Glam that won't spend its life hidden under a water block even though
that would probably be pretty cool today
we're highlighting the k7xx black headphones of course from m M drop and
they have a bunch of other cool products that you can check out at the link in
the video description as well hopefully you guys know about Mast drop by now but
if not the concept is still pretty simple the more people commit to a
purchase the more people that commit to a certain price for a certain product
the lower the price of that product goes these are the exact same ones that Lin
reviewed last year and remember this is a limited drop so if you want a pair
you're going to have to act pretty fast these headphones were configured by mass
drop and Manu manufactured by AKG so if you want to check him out and grab a
pair of k7xx headphones head over to the link in the video description down
below thanks for watching guys if you liked this video and you're like I'm
going to buy the 6800 or maybe just not an Enthusiast
series 1 cuz I want to play games cool
if you dislike the video cuz you're like screw you I want 10 cores and I don't
care about gaming performance and I don't do anything else with it anyways I
just want 10 cores you can uh yeah you can do that if you want to purchase one
of the items featured in this video check out Amazon if you want to talk
about the items featured in this video check out the Forum you can become a
contributor there it doesn't really do a ton but it's like cool and you get a little badge thing and some people care
about those and there's also like a member title thingy that shows up in
it's different colors depending on what T don't worry about it uh if you want to
see our review of the 6700k check that out up here gaming
processor that's what it's marketed for so that actually totally makes sense