 Let's be honest with each other a lot of what we do in the do-it-yourself PC community is because we can and that's not always a bad thing Especially if you just want to throw in some sick looking lighting or something like that, but today we're talking about CPUs specifically Intel's new Broadwell e Enthusiast line even though CPU cores have become a little like cylinders in your city only Cruising sedans engine where the only point in having a v12 is to say screw you I have 12 cylinders Intel is hoping that its new top-end 10 core behemoth with a price to match Will be a hit with those who need top-end performance So let's take a look at it and the rest of the Broadwell e line and see if it's more than just a status symbol for techies The GTX 1080 amp extreme from Zotac features their ice storm cooler with triple 90 millimeter eco fans For better airflow and heat extraction check out the link below to learn more So it's been almost two years since we've gotten a new line of Enthusiast processors from Intel the main thing that sets these CPUs apart from their mainstream brethren is the inclusion of more cores and the inclusion of more RAM slots Broadwell e is no exception the bottom two chips on the ladder the core i7 6800 K and 6850 K are each hexa core with the latter providing 40 PCI Express lanes instead of 28 while the 6900 K features 8 cores and 16 threads meaning it's essentially a direct replacement for the previous top dog the i7 5960 X But if you want to go all out the new chip sitting at the top of the heap is the 6950 X Featuring 10 cores and 20 threads the most that Intel has ever packed into an enthusiast class CPU Of course it shouldn't be surprising that since Intel is trying to set 10 cores as the new gold standard for desktops Consumers will pay a hefty premium the chips MSRP is over 1700 US dollars enough to build an entire high-end gaming rig with Peripherals that would be like pretty good and all you're really getting for the $600 premium over the roughly 1100 dollar 6900 K other than the X in the model number that is important to some people are two more cores and an extra Five megabytes of cash and even then you take an overall hit on clock speed Now huge price jumps for more cores isn't exactly new for anyone But spending that much for two more cores when you're already at eight and then taking a hit in the speed department is Iffy especially at that cost our best guess is that Intel priced at this high to keep part of their zon line from being Cannibalized by the highest and core i7s as many zon skews have 10 cores and will work on consumer grade x99 motherboards But for the average home PC builder, how can anything actually justify forking this much money over for? Well broadly does come with a cool feature where the core with the greatest overclocking potential as determined by Intel at the factory is Marked in the BIOS with an asterisk. So if you're running a heavily single threaded application and want the best possible Performance you can overclock that core alone then in Windows Intel turbo boost 3.0 will Automatically set the affinity of that application to that core specifically Making optimizing performance for single threaded programs pretty easy But that alone won't get most of you to spend $1,700 especially as these features are on all the Broadwell e skews Not just the 6950 X and even then why are you optimizing for? Single core applications if you're buying one of these CPUs You should probably be buying one of these CPUs for definitely multi threaded applications as in single core They don't do that great. So speaking of which let's talk about performance instead We benchmarked all four Broadwell e chips on the x99 deluxe 2 from a suce which features their new aura Onboard RGB lighting for not only some cool effects on the PCIe slots But also for the rest of your rig Which is pretty cool as it has a header to allow board lighting effects to sync with other case lights You also get a u.2 and m.2 slots for higher-end NVMe SSDs and extra 4 pin connector for additional CPU power and USB 3.1 support including a type-c connector the rest of our test bench consisted of 32 gigabytes of Corsair dominator DDR4 and h100i GTX AIO a GeForce GTX 1080 founders edition and a Kingston HyperX Savage SSD We tested the Broadwell e line against the previous generation 5960x as well as the current Skylake core i7 6700k so we instead use the Asus z170 deluxe for the latter right off the bat It's pretty fair to say that it's hard to justify buying any Broadwell e chip if your heaviest workload will be gaming as the $315 Skylake 6700k beat every single Broadwell e skew in all of our gaming benchmarks including The flagship 6950x even in cities skylines which tends to be more CPU bound than many other titles But of course that's not surprising It's been known for a long time that CPUs with more than four cores See more utility on the content creation side and with things like file compression or encryption Here we see more threads and cores benefiting in Cinebench 7-zip and H.264 Video rendering as well as in AIDA 64's AES encryption benchmark Photo editing benchmarks were a bit of a mix bagged however which AIDA 64's photo works benchmark favoring the higher core count of Broadwell e but real benches GIMP tests showed the Skylake 6700k pull ahead on the single core tasks Indeed Cinebench's single core benchmark showed the 6700k well ahead of the other four Broadwell e chips as well But what about overclocking could cranking up our clock speeds add more value to the Broadwell e line We chose to overclock the 6900k since it's the closest thing to a direct upgrade from the older X series skew We got our review sample up to 4.3 gigahertz or 300 megahertz over the stock turbo boost Unfortunately there was a huge power and thermal penalty as CPU cores shot up to 88 degrees Celsius And we had to put 1.375 volts through the processor to get it stable Not exactly ideal since the last gen has well e series seemed to have a little more headroom across the board Performance did increase notably in some benchmarks with the overclock But single core performance still lagged behind our 6700k running at stock speeds So with all of that said do any of these CPUs really make any sense? No doubt there are real scenarios like 3D rendering or really heavy encryption work where more cores do matter But from a price to performance standpoint the 6800k seems to make the most sense since you're only paying $120 more than you would for a 6700k and get two extra hyper threaded cores And while it only has 28 PCI Express lanes that might not be as important as it used to be especially as Nvidia is No longer supporting more than two graphics cards in SLI for gaming purposes And you'll pay a hefty premium to upgrade to the 6850 K's 40 lanes I'm talking almost another $200 So while Broadwell E might be the ultimate thing for enthusiasts to drool over right now I'd rather spend my money on the glam that won't spend its life hidden under a water block Even though that would probably be pretty cool Today we're highlighting the K7XX black headphones of course from Massdrop And they have a bunch of other cool products that you can check out at the link in the video description as well Hopefully you guys know about Massdrop by now But if not the concept is still pretty simple the more people commit to a purchase The more people that commit to a certain price for a certain product the lower the price of that product goes These are the exact same ones that Linus reviewed last year and remember this is a limited drop So if you want a pair you're gonna have to act pretty fast these headphones were configured by Massdrop and manufactured by AKG So if you want to check them out and grab a pair of K7XX headphones head over to the link in the video description down below Thanks for watching guys if you liked this video, and you're like I'm going to buy the 6800 or maybe just not an enthusiast series one because I want to play games Cool, if you dislike the video because you're like screw you I want 10 cores I don't care about gaming performance, and I don't do anything else with it anyways I just want 10 cores you can yeah You can do that if you want to purchase one of the items featured in this video check out Amazon If you want to talk about the items featured in this video check out the forum you can become a contributor there It doesn't really do a ton But it's like cool and you get a little badge thing and some people care about those and there's also like a member title thingy That shows up in its different colors depending on what to Don't worry about it if you want to see our review of the 6700K check that out up here gaming processor That's what it's marketed for so that actually totally makes sense