Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsStaggering performance, amazing specs. For the price this beast is the best you can get. You won't regret it.
Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2017
For the price you cannot go wrong with this. The only issue that I found was that the number of PCIe lanes described in the documentation for this CPU was not enough for what I wanted. The specs say it has 16 lanes, but my video card alone needs 16 lanes. Plus I have an M.2 hard drive that needs 4. I almost didn't buy it, and went with a different CPU and motherboard. But, I did some more research and found that these are just the lanes in the CPU, and the bridge chip has its own lanes. These lanes are really intended for the graphics card only. So, if you look how the motherboard is setup, these 16 lanes go to the first x16 slot intended for a video card. That is how mine is. Then the skylake chipset that is paired with this CPU has 20 more lanes. That is enough for another x16 card, and a x4 M.2 hard drive or whatever. So, you actually end up with 36 lanes of PCIe between the two. Once I saw that, there was no question this is for me.
It is a 14nm process, which is one of the newer processes, and it runs at 4Ghz, The CPU is unlocked, so you can overclock if you want. I put on a water cooler and just did some brief checks with OC, and I ran at 4.5Ghz without issue. However, I really don't need it and I don't want to risk burning it out fast, so I put it back to 4Ghz for now. But, I know I can run much faster in the future if I want to.
As for specs and performance, this is a middle of the road 4 core, 8 thread CPU. It has the memory controller built in, supporting DDR4 memory, which is what I use, and the performance is just staggering. >34GB/s of memory throughput, that's wild.
The CPU has 8MB of smartcache that is shared amongst the cores. This is much better than normal cache, it allows a program in cache to be shared with another core, when the thread jumps to a new core, without copying the data to another location in cache. The performance increase of this small feature is quite large. The CPU has a decent video card built in, but I don't use it. I opted for the Nvidia GTX1080. Combining this CPU with that graphics card, M.2 drive, and DDR4 memory makes this a powerhouse that can stand its own against basically anything. However, the built in graphics do support 4K resolutions, so if you are not playing cutting edge games, or VR, the graphics card built in is probably all you would ever need.
Without going into the technical specifics of this CPU, it basically has all the features that you would expect from any i7 CPU. The price, for what you get, is really unbeatable. You can get an i7 with more cores, or cache, but you will pay a large amount more. For 99.99% of people out there this is more than you will need. There is nothing you will get from the CPUs that are 2X+ the price that you will even notice. Just make sure you pair this with a good chipset, like the Z170, and never look back, you will run so fast you won't believe it.
My PC runs windows 10. From the time the BIOS screen disappears to when it needs my password is about 3.5 seconds. From hitting enter after my password until the machine is fully booted, and I have full control, no hourglass, etc, is about 2-2.5 seconds. So, I boot in under 6 seconds, basically. That is a full cold boot, not a resume from sleep.
Pros: 4Ghz, unlocked and ready for overclocking (use a water cooler if you overclock this bad-boy). 4K graphics built in. 16 lanes of PCIe on board for fast access to the video card. 20 more lanes of PCIe on the chipset, so you can have another 16x video card, and a M.2 x4 drive, or whatever else you might want. New generation cache speeds up thread jumping from core to core. DDR4 memory controller with >34GB/s throughput. The biggest PRO is the price, for what you get.
Cons: Would have been nice to have 12MB or more of cache, but the cost would have been significantly more. For the price, there is really no downside to this CPU.
