Kaby Lake Leaked Sample Review

[SteelCrysis]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/inte...,4836.html

Intel’s Kaby Lake efficiency pretenses are thrown out the window in the Core i7-7700K, at least when paired with this motherboard. Perhaps we have something to look forward to when Z270 finally gets here?

For true performance enthusiasts, the real news is that Intel’s new mainstream-socket enthusiast CPU will reach new overclocking heights. Unfortunately, getting its extra heat out of the core was quite a challenge, as even stepping up from Noctua’s NH-U12S to its NH-D14 saved a mere 3°C. This overclocking experiment even required a 15°C room temperature, which is something most readers won’t be able to accomplish. Big liquid might help, but since the cooler’s heatpipes were barely warm to the touch, there’s a possibility that 4.8 GHz may be the limit of this sample while using any ambient-temperature cooling solution. Still, the fact that it reached 4.8 GHz without sub-ambient cooling is encouraging.

Other points of interest, such as built-in HEVC and VP9 8/10-bit encode/decode, may be revealed when our CPU team is able to publish their full review. Until then, the extra overclocking capability at least gives performance enthusiasts who don’t yet (or still) own a (functioning) Skylake processor a reason to wait for the Kaby Lake release.