SPCR

Nice!

It seems to be a nice option to have, at least once prices cool down a bit. Although you'd be a bit concious of how silent an AiO system can be made, the enforced TDP limit does solve that somewhat.

A quick question regarding your "platform cost" section: it looks like you've got AMD's A8-7600 using $60 RAM where the rest of the DDR3 systems are using $40 RAM. Your test notes mention a single DDR3 and a single DDR4 option, and the notes on the price graph call out only the Skylake system as needing the DDR4. Was this intended?

My guess is that all the DDR3 systems were meant to use the $40 RAM, and only the Skylake system uses the $60 RAM. Would this be true? If so, does this affect your "performance per dollar" results?

A Skylake-E with 8 cores, 20 MB L3 and 256 MB L4 would be a big hit with gamers, but currently Intel is not interested to discuss that.

Tzupy wrote:A Skylake-E with 8 cores, 20 MB L3 and 256 MB L4 would be a big hit with gamers...

heh.

Tzupy wrote:A Skylake-E with 8 cores, 20 MB L3 and 256 MB L4 would be a big hit with gamers, but currently Intel is not interested to discuss that.

Not following.... given that i want one, i dont see a much benefit on the gaming side.

Skylake e hasn't been released as a Xeon, high end desktop CPU or anything. There might be engineering samples floating around somewhere but I can understand if Intel doesn't want to discuss it with gamers.

CA_Steve wrote:

Tzupy wrote:A Skylake-E with 8 cores, 20 MB L3 and 256 MB L4 would be a big hit with gamers...

heh.

Must be a WoW gamer

If the prices drop, maybe the 5775C is the right thing for a gaming PC for the Mrs.

Ha, iteresting article!

It seems that the i7-5775C is a perfect chip for the Apex MI-008 which is very cheap and quiet for a small case plus power supply. There are few if any single slot GPU that would fit in this Apex, and even if there were it would be noisier.

@Lawrence Lee:
Is there really no way to increase maximum package power consumption so CPU have higher clocks? Have you tried Power Plane Current Limit with CPU Thermal Throttling disabled?

EDIT:
I mean, I've read somewhere that it's possible to increase TDP in Intel XTU to increase graphics performance...

"If you ever decide to upgrade to a discrete card, it will be placed on the sidelines with its talents being wasted." - spcr

After having read MANY (possibly all...) reviews of the i7-5775c, I have to say that this part is absolutely the most flawed part of the article. Now, it is an innocent flaw but a true flaw. Reason is that Max Frames Per Second, or avg, or any fps measuring system is not the most important gaming benchmark anymore. The latest one is the "time period of most crappy experience" benchmark, the amount of time in lowest framerates, the 99th percentile frame duration. It is the time spent when your game is moving like crap and then perks up again. This is the best measure of experience when pairing with a high end discrete card. I know of no one who buys 1080p monitors anymore. Eight years ago I had 1200p and I am not wealthy. 1440p is the absolute standard for any gaming system or even productivity system. 27" 1440p IPS monitor is the standard and they are cheap.

so, the most important thing to gaming is the 99th Percentile time spent measurement as the max FPS or avg fps is determined by the amount of $$$ spent on a video card and not so much the cpu. You would have to go back to much older cpu's to get held back at 1440p. The i7-5775c is measured as the best chip to use for gaming with a discrete card.

Also, the price is $366 dollars currently. Goes from 366-369. The z97 motherboards are cheap, the ddr3 1866 prices are pretty good too.