 While most of the hype in the CPU world right now is centered around AMD's upcoming Ryzen release, Intel has no plans to take that lying down, and has just unveiled their seventh generation core processors for desktop. Codename, Kaby Lake. INTRO EVGA's DG87 full tower case features optimized airflow pathing to help keep your hardware cool. Check it out at the link in the video description. They claim to be taking computing to the next level, but I'm pretty sure marketing guys would just get fired if they don't say that kind of stuff. Only performance will tell whether a shiny new Kaby Lake will be worth 350 of your hard-earned dollars. We'll be looking at Intel's newest consumer-grade flagship, the Core i7-7700K. And if you think that just means the usual features, you know, quad-core hyper-threading and overclockability on Z series chipsets, well sir, you'd be 100% correct. Out of the box, there's a bump on the clock speed compared to its Skylake predecessor, the 6700K, and you also get Intel HD Graphics 630 as opposed to 530, though if you spend this kind of money on a high-end i7, you're probably using discrete graphics from the likes of Nvidia or AMD anyways. So to find the differences, we clearly need to dig a bit deeper. There doesn't seem to be much else on paper to separate these chips. They have the same TDP of 91 watts, the same 16-piece IE lanes, and even the same manufacturing process. The old TikTok cadence meant a new process, so smaller processors every two years, but Kaby Lake is still using the same 14-nanometer FinFET transistors we've had since Broadwell in 2014. So at this point, I wouldn't blame you for not being mega super excited about the 7700K itself, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything worth talking about with respect to the platform. One thing that will be immediately relevant to a lot of folks that own a 4K display will be the ability to watch Netflix in 4K. This is thanks to a new DRM scheme that I'm sure consumers will just love, because it has nothing to do with processing power at all, and everything to do with a special hardware-based decoder that can only be found in Kaby Lake CPUs at this time. On the subject of 4K content, you also get 4K 10-bit video decoding through the VP9 codec used by YouTube. So if you have a monitor with 10-bit color and a supported video card, you can get smoother color transitions when watching supported content. Very cool. Perhaps more interesting than that is support for Optane, which is Intel's version of 3D Crosspoint. A new type of memory with cells that are packed more densely, meaning higher capacities and faster speeds, that is expected to perform somewhere between system RAM and an SSD. Pretty freaking cool, but kind of like SATA Express back in the day, there's no word on if and when we'll see it on consumer PCs, but hopefully we'll get this one. There are also new chipsets. We tested our CPU on an ASUS ROG Maximus 9 code, featuring the Z270 chipset, which adds native support for USB 3.1 10-gigabit and an additional four PCI Express 3.0 lanes, which is actually a welcome change considering how popular PCIe-based storage is becoming in the form of tiny and increasingly affordable M.2 drives. Some other fun features of this board specifically include a water flow sensor, a USB 3.1 10-gigabit front panel header, Aura and Aura Sync to add some RGB to your case, reinforced PCI Express slots for heavy GPUs, and a built-in headphone amplifier. But enough chit chat. Did this 7700K Z270 1.2 punch impress us with its performance gains? We compared it to a Skylake 6700K, both at stock and at overclocked speeds using ASUS' AI tuner automatic overclock and setting temperature and voltage targets to 80 degrees and 1.35 volts to keep things safe, which gave us 4.9 GHz on Kabylake and 4.6 on Skylake. Let us know in the comments if you'd like a full OC guide, including manual tuning in the future. Let's start with thermals and power draw. Temperatures were quite similar, though Kabylake showed a slight improvement at load, though both chips were comfortably below their thermal throttling point in AIDA64. Kabylake similarly showed a small improvement in power draw. Nothing dramatic, and it won't affect your system build planning, since it's easy to run an enthusiast single graphics card system on an inexpensive 450-500W power supply anyways. Now let's dive into performance numbers. Our synthetics, which included CPUMark, Y-Cruncher, Cinebench, and ROG Reelbench, showed Kabylake offering improvements of about 5 to 7% across the board, including in single-threaded applications, which isn't terrible, but isn't horribly impressive either. And when you compare Kabylake at stock versus our overclocked Skylake chip, which ran within 100MHz of each other, the gap becomes smaller, making these improvements an even more minor selling point for enthusiasts who, well, overclock. Gaming performance wasn't much different, as there was no appreciable difference between generations when gaming with a discrete GTX 1080, with Kabylake actually performing slightly worse in some situations. For onboard video aficionados, the integrated HD 630 graphics do show a small improvement over Skylake, but the 1-2 extra frames per second don't really make it viable for new AAA titles. Bringing us to the conclusion. These small improvements don't make Kabylake a bad platform. If you liked last year's Madden game, you'll probably like the new one with all the updated player stats and special team jerseys too. They just mean that Kabylake isn't really a sensible upgrade for a core i7 machine built in the last one to three years. Something that could be a product of the challenges associated with building faster chips on current technology, or could be a product of a complacent Intel that hasn't really had a real competitor in almost a decade. I'm sure the next couple of years will tell us once and for all which one it is. you use online as though you are browsing from a different country. The best part is you don't have to take my word for it. You can try it for free with 500 megs of data and no credit card required. Heading over to tunnelbear.com slash LTT and using our link you can save 10% if you get an unlimited data plan. All right guys if you like this video like it if you dislike this video dislike it get subscribed to see more of our content. I'm sure there's going to be a crazy insane fanboy war down below so try to keep it as civil as possible and if you'd like to take it away from the YouTube comments you can go to the forum. I'm sure that's going to be a war still but try to keep it civil there as well. If you want to check out some of our merch you can see that in the link down below. Also there's a link to Amazon where you can buy whatever processor your heart desires. And if you want to see another video check out this one which is actually not a line of suck hips video. This is a channel super fun video.