A few weeks ago, Intel released their newest generation of CPUs upon the world. Skylake PCs are now customisable on our website, so you can get your very own Skylake Custom Gaming PC! Continue reading to find out all the details about Skylake.
For anyone considering a new gaming PC that they want to be able to upgrade over the years, this is what you will want to buy.
Firstly, you’ll require the fairly-new DDR4 RAM. Prices of DDR4 has dropped significantly since the initial release (for the Haswell-E CPUs last year).
The Z170 chipset is a great new tool that makes the impending success of Skylake possible. Now that we can have fast M.2 drives, SATA Express drives and USB 3.1, the old way of stealing bandwidth from the graphics card just won’t cut it. Thanks to Intel and the Z170 chipset, we have more lanes to give bandwidth to devices that need it, without necessarily stealing it from another component. This should equate to faster and better performing everything, if you had a lot of things in your PC that demanded bandwidth.
The hype for Skylake may be a bit too high, right now at least. For anyone considering a new gaming PC that they want to be able to upgrade over the years, this is what you will want to buy. DDR4 and the Z170 are the sidekicks that make it all worth it. So, buying into the chipset is certainly a good decision, you can swap out the CPU in a few years for even more optimisations in the CPUs over the years.
The CPU core is more efficient and able to handle more instructions simultaneously than Haswell or Broadwell CPUs could. Intel has embedded chunks of DRAM into the CPU package since Haswell, to help improve memory bandwidth for gaming. With Skylake CPUs it’s been upgraded to “eDRAM+”. It continues to act as a cache to store recently used data and instructions, but it’s now fully coherent, meaning it can be used to cache information for the CPU, not just the GPU. This should translate to increased performance in things other than just gaming.
A new feature that Skylake brings to the table is Speed Shift, a power-saving technique that lets the CPU intelligently adjust its power state – this is probably most important to those looking to upgrade their laptop to a Skylake powered laptop.
Skylake chips are faster and more power efficient than the previous generation Haswell chips – Skylake can drive three 4K monitors at 60Hz utilising dedicated transistors for decoding and encoding 4K. One demonstration showed playback of a 4K RAW video stream from a Canon video camera, playback was smooth using Skylake’s graphics chip, compared to using just the CPU where it would drop frames. But of course, this probably isn’t of great importance to gamers, who are likely to use a dedicated graphics card.
If you’re on anything Haswell, and can still sort of do what you want to be able to do, just at lower graphics settings, etc. then you can probably skip this upgrade for now – wait for next year at least. Anyone else on anything before Haswell and not running overclocked/multiple GPUs, you likely want to consider this.