Choosing a PC processor Skylake vs Kaby Lake

We have already had a small review of the 7th generation of Intel processors and while choosing a gaming PC configuration of the year we bumped into the question – should we choose a processor of 6th generation and assemble a new PC now, or wait till all the Kaby Lake processors are released and choose something from the new line.

Recently we found an interesting information about forthcoming Kaby Lake i3-7350K processor, a dual core “brain” that would work on 4.2 GHz frequency. Taking into consideration that during the last year we’ve been choosing 3.5 GHz i5-6600K as the gaming flagship on reasonable price that news aroused new wave of discussion in our team. Would i3 Kaby Lake processor be better than Skylake i5. In other words – the faster – the better?

Faster means better?

Thanks to the guys from Geekbench, we now have the first results of tests and it looks like higher frequency does not always mean better performance.

At first sight we can see that benchmark results of i3-7350K are close to i5-6400 and even better than i5-4670K when talking about multi-core benchmark and faster in single-core due to higher frequency.

However, if we dig a bit deeper, we would see that the result are not as significant as it may seem due to 2 facts. The first and main thing is the price of the processor – $177. You can compare it with i5-6600K (which is still faster according to the geekbench) that would cost you $219. You might say that it’s a bit unfair to compare i3 and i5 models, however it turned out that even i3 processor of current generation con compete with i3-7350k score. With a slight boost i3-6100 can reach the same numbers but having the price of $117, which makes i3-7350k even less attractive.

Ok, but what about the forthcoming i5-7600? Would it be better than current i5-6600k (which is our optimum choice this year)?

I5-7600k vs i5-6600k

Definitely yes. According to the leaked benchmark.

The Kaby Lake I5-7600k is 7 to 10 percent more powerful than current i5-6600k, but again what would be the cost? Google says it would be $239 which is only $20 more expensive to compare with Skylake model. Sounds reasonable, but with the release of the new processor the older brother will loose some few dollars and we can see the difference around $40.

In this case you need to decide for your whether this 10% difference really costs the money.

As for me, 10% of performance definitely worth $10, however Kaby Lake processors are not released yead, and they are rumored to be launched on January the 5th 2017, which means we are unlikely to find them on Amazon till February 2017. I personally am not going to wait 2 more months so I ordered my i5-6600k today.

Whether to follow me or not is your choice, but I hope we helped you to find the processor for your needs and budget, and if you need more hardware advices – read our articles, for example – Gaming PC configuration of Autumn 2016.