7700k Tested at Tom's Hardware

[Sampsy]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...00k-overclocking-performance-review,4836.html

Essentially it performed like a slightly overclocked 6700k, but was hotter and not as energy efficient as expected. It might have been an engineering sample, or a retail unit, but they weren't sure.

 

[Sampsy]

I guess we have to wait for more reviews, maybe they just got a dud.

To be clear this isn't a review. The chip hasn't been released yet - I guess somebody in the supply chain got a hold of this one and sent it to them. It may be an engineering sample instead of an engineering unit. They may have been running early, crappy firmware on their z170 board. In other words, there are lots of reasons that the actual retail 7700k may perform better than this.

 

[Sampsy]

What makes you so sure that this isn't representative of a retail CPU?
Intel are hardly known for massive performance increases between generations.

I'm not sure - that's the point really. If I had to guess I'd say that their results are probably fairly accurate, but they might not be.

 

[Sampsy]

For gaming at 1080p or higher, the GPU is always the main bottleneck these days.

I'm currently running BF1 at 1440p and my GPU is so badly bottlenecked by my 2500k that it often sits around 50% GPU usage. A 6700k would improve things, but the performance increase gained from going to a 6700k from a 2500k is not worth the cost of a new CPU, Motherboard, RAM and Win 10.