Intel’s Core i7-6700k ‘Skylake’ up to 29% faster than the i7-4790k ‘Devil’s Canyon’

Intel’s former top-of-the line enthusiast CPU, the i7-4790k, was and still is a bit of a beast.

Running at a stock 4.0GHz core clock and packing an 8mb cache, outside of taking Falcon Northwest’s approach and using an absurdly over-specced 18-core Xeon E5-2699 V3, personal PC computing doesn’t get much faster.

Enter Intel’s new king of the Skylake hill, the Core i7-6700k.

Like with the i7-4790k, the i7-6700k runs at 4.0 GHz and sports an 8mb cache. In fact, it features largely the same spec-sheet as the i7-4790k.

That said, while both CPUs are equal, the new Skylake CPU is, well, more equal.

Having obtained a sample of the new CPU, Techbang benchmarked the chip and found that the i7-6700k outperforms the older CPU by a good margin in a number of scenarios.

Intel Core i7-6700k ‘Skylake’ vs. i7-4790k ‘Devil’s Canyon’. Image courtesy of Computerbase.

With the same core speed, those performance advantages come down to microarchitectural improvements made to Skylake.

To earn such large performance gains through the tweaks made to the new microarchitecture is impressive to say the least, and we can’t wait to see what can be done with the i7-6700k when overclocked.

Best of all, the CPU will support DDR4 RAM (or DDR3 if you can’t quite afford the new memory standard).

The Core i7-6700k as well as the Z170 Express chipsets and Core i5-6600K will be demonstrated first in August at Gamescom.