Intel's 7th Gen Kaby lake CPU leaked "reportedly"

I'll just leave this here.




Source: WCCF Tech

Well, we need to take out size of die's here when we are comparing our x99 line of CPU's and z170 lines. It's actually better to work it in terms of socket and not chipset as there are multiple chipsets for the Socket 1151 cpus (those are our 6700k, 6600, etc..).

The Socket 2011-3 is what we call the enthusiast CPU's. While they are a generation behind the mainstream (socket 1151), they offer many things you won't find on the mainstream. Skylake introduced a new way of handling PCI lanes, along with the new take on the IMC (Internal Memory Controller).

Skylake, for example, can only handle 28 lanes for the PCI. Meaning, you can only have a max of 3 video cards. Now the socket 2011-3 can handle up to 40 (I say up to because the cheaper 5820k 6c/12t cpu can only handle 28). Now, not everyone is going to be rocking 3 cards, hence why the mainstream is so appealing. It lets you still do a dual sli set up, but have lanes left over for m.2 NVMe PCI storage devices, sound cards, wireless card, or whatever else you need. Our Socket 2011-3, while supporting more PCI lanes, they also have better cache built into them (better imply they have more, not better quality). They can also, thanks to their IMC and the chipset, support more RAM than the z170.

The 5930k and the 5960X support 40 Lanes and more cache, plus a few other subtle advantages such as better optimized multi-core performance. While the skylake series, while not offering the chance for quad sli GPU, still allow you to rock 2 GPU's, fast ass storage and up to 64GB of ram.

There's a reason the 2011-3 is called enthusiast class. Because it provides you with the ability to build systems that have more power than we can actually use in the consumer world. Quad SLI is pointless, 128GB of ram is pointless, and high cache is pointless. Enthusiast class CPU's are really better tailored towards professionals who can utilize high ram and high core counts. There, for the most part, is really no true performance increase when comparing enthusiast to mainstream.

Hopefully that's not too confusing.

I try. ;) Thanks

Have you seen the amount of 3 way SLI and 5 PCI device motherboards out now for z170? You'd be surprised. And I'm referring to motherboards in the $100-$200 range. Not including those $400+ motherboards.

got me on the dual gpu cards, forgot about them since it's been so long since we've had a new one.  

There is no performance loss between 16x and 8x. Most GPU's have been struggling to use up the complete 8x bandwidth to begin with.

If you use the motherboards that maintain x8/x8 with the third at x4, that x4 is going through the PCH, which add latency and traffic over the DMI link. x8/x4/x4 would all go straight to the processor.