 For a while now, Intel has been providing us with enthusiast-grade X-series platforms, starting with X58 and since then rolling out X79 and X99. And although most of you probably know that these chipsets support beefy 6 and 8-core processors and tons of PCI Express lanes, what exactly are you getting in terms of performance by going for an X chipset? And with the price of DDR4 dropping, is it more feasible for the average PC builder these days? Also, like the video if you guys are interested in more show content that's similar to the style of Scrapyard Wars but isn't necessarily the same thing. The Logitech G303 features a lightweight design, an advanced optical sensor with DeltaZero technology for precise tracking, and RGB lighting to match your setup. Click now to learn more. Today we have a showdown between the Haswell E Core i7-5820K with 6 cores and 12 threads running on an X99 chipset and the new Skylake Core i7-6700K with 4 cores and 8 threads running on a Z170 chipset. Although the 5820K isn't the most expensive processor compatible with the X99 chipset, we picked it to see how a processor one step up from Intel's highest and mainstream offering would fare. In addition to the extra processing cores, X99 also offers more PCI Express lanes than the mainstream options like the Z170 chipset. You get 20 lanes with the 6700K but 28 lanes with the 5820K and the more full-fat X99 CPUs, namely the 5930K and the 5960X, give you a total of 40 PCIe lanes, making X99 an interesting option if you're planning to run 3 or 4 graphics cards. But what about those of us who don't have just huge stacks of cash to drop on an SLI or Crossfire setup and are just curious about moving to higher-end chipsets? Well, we checked prices on Newegg for the entire X99 and Z170 platforms, including motherboards, CPUs, and DDR4 RAM. At the time we shot this video, you could expect to pay about $30 more for a 5820K than a 6700K and about $75 more for an X99 motherboard than a Z170. So you're looking at around $100-ish-dollar delta. Total average cost for an X99 platform using a 5820K comes out to about $745, assuming you'll pay around $115 for 16GB of DDR4 RAM, which has come down in price quite a bit since its release. One thing to keep in mind is that although you can use quad-channel RAM on the X99 platform, dual-channel will actually work just fine, so you should be able to save a few bucks by buying just two sticks of memory if you can live without quad-channel setup. So what exactly do you get for that extra $100? To find out, we ran a few numbers for both gaming and non-gaming benchmarks on our test bench. We used a pair of ASUS motherboards, the X99 Deluxe and the Z170 Deluxe, and kept all other components constant across both platforms, namely 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR RAM running at 2133MHz, a reference Nvidia GTX 980Ti, and a 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSD, a Corsair H100i GTX CPU cooler, and a Corsair AX1200i power supply. We ran both of our CPUs and graphics cards at stock speeds. Jumping right into it, we started out with a couple synthetic benchmarks to test multi-core performance. Although the Skylake 6700K performed respectively in both Cinebench and 7-Zip, the 5820K with its six cores outclassed it by a pretty comfortable margin, winning by about 15% in Cinebench and about 23% in 7-Zip. Our more single-threaded benchmarks, though, told a different story. We used the Dolphin benchmark, which is actually part of a Nintendo Wii emulator, but never mind that. We used it to ray-trace a 3D image. Here, the Skylake processor shows its improved single-core performance as it beats out the more expensive Haswell eChip by over two minutes. We also ran Web Expert, a benchmark that tests both HTML5 and JavaScript performance on the latest version of Google Chrome. The 6700K won again, beating out the 5820K by about 19% in this more single-core intensive task. Gaming-wise, we looked at a couple titles that we knew about from past testing. You can see our Corsair gaming video up here. We knew that they would benefit from a higher-end CPU. First up, we used Citi Skylines, which we ran at 1080p with everything maxed out. Here, the 6700K won by a full 9 FPS, even with its fewer total cores. Moving it all over to Total War Attila, however, we also ran at 1080p with extreme settings, but this time around, the 5820K won by a full 5 FPS. We also wanted to check out a couple other popular titles just to see if there was much of a difference in those graphics-intensive ones, namely Tomb Raider and Crisis 3. At 1080p, the settings were cranked, and it was hard to distinguish these two chips apart. Although the 5820K won by 2 or 3 FPS in both cases, it wasn't a difference I'd call significant, as both processors got over 125 FPS in Tomb Raider and around 100 FPS in Crisis 3. So what's our conclusion? For starters, it's pretty clear that the extra cores you get with the X99 platform will help with things like encoding, video and photo editing, and other heavy number-crunching-like tasks like, say, file compression or data encryption. But gaming results can vary quite a bit depending on what's in your Steam or Origin library or whatever else. And the 4-core Skylake processors have a bit of a lead in more common single-threaded tasks like web browsing, and although you can overclock a 5820K to match the 4 GHz stock speed of the 6700K, other tests have suggested that Skylake is still superior with respected instructions per clock, or IPC, meaning that the Z170 looks like the way to go for most of you if what you're going to be doing on your PC is web browsing and gaming. Even so, thanks in part to the greater availability of DDR4 memory, it looks more affordable and practical than ever before to set up an enthusiast-grade platform if you'll be taking advantage of its extra cores and PCI express lanes. Also, don't forget that we're seeing newer features natively supported by the Z170, such as USB 3.1, starting to pop up on newer x99 boards as well. So you won't necessarily be missing out on latest gen tech and be left feeling like the CPUs are always shinier on the other side of the proverbial fence. If you're building a mobile app and are searching for a simple payment solution, you should definitely check out Braintree. They offer code for easy online payments through their Braintree v.0 SDK, which is just one small snippet of code. You can get set up in less than 10 minutes, and if you have any issues during setup, their support staff is ready to walk you through the process over the phone if need be. 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