It’s widely accepted that Intel’s Core i7-4770K can get rather hot, especially when the chip is fully loaded and an overclock is applied. Since the inauguration of Devil’s Canyon, temperature and TIM quality has certainly improved. Skylake also benefits from a better thermal solution too.
The 6600K demonstrates great thermal performance and the 6700K is also fairly efficient too. Although the overall temperature is higher, it’s important to note the clock speed of 6700K which turbo boosts to around 4.2GHz.
Overclocking
The introduction of Skylake sees a return to great control for overclocking, allowing users to access full range Base Clock (BCLK) tuning granularity. With other CPUs such as the Core i7-4790K the overclocking is ratio-based meaning the ratio or multiplier is the only component which can be adjusted but now both the BCLK and ratio can be tweaked for even more flexibility and a return to “old skool” overclocking.
It’s important to note we are not using Engineering Samples (ES) for our testing/overclocking. Our CPUs are retail and haven’t been cherry picked or optimised for performance. This is therefore a representation of what end-users can expect when they buy off the shelf.
For this part of the review the maximum overclocked was achieved by using the Corsair Hydro Series H100i GTX.
The objective here is to obtain the best result by either altering just the ratio or altering both the ratio and BCLK. For us, just adjusting the ratio and leaving the BCLK on auto (100MHz) realised the best results.
To simulate maximum load we use AIDA64. Unlike games and other benchmarks which only push the system to a certain point, AIDA64 stability test pushes temperatures to the absolute maximum.
Intel Core i5-6600K
We managed to overclock 6600K from 3.5GHz to 4.7GHz by adjusting the ratio/multiplier to 47 – a 34% overclock. This is a considerable achievement and represents a very good result. Furthermore, this milestone only required 1.35v which kept the temperatures within the realms of ‘acceptable’. It’s quite clear that Intel has greatly improved the TIM solution on this chip.
Intel Core i7-6700K
Turning to the Core i7 6700K, we once again hit the 4.7GHZ mark as a maximum overclock – 17% increase. The lowest voltage required for this overclock was 1.34v. Unfortunately, no amount of boost in CPU voltage would assist in pushing the 6700K beyond the 4.7GHz mark. Nevertheless this is still a decent result and the temperatures once again remained relatively low compared to previous generations of Intel CPUs.
On the subsequent pages we’ll be benchmarking both CPUs at stock and overclocked settings, showing you what you can expect out of the box and what can be assumed with a substantial overclock applied.
