Skylake - let's wait and pray for it together

It is done:

i5-6600K - 260€
ASUS Z170-P - 131€
2 x 4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport 2400 CL 16 - 60€
Shipping 9€

460€ for an upgrade that should be viable for quite some time.

 

Dat exchange rate tho...

And... for science...

$100 buys a lot of gpu...

And that's ignoring all of the crazy deals that were available the past year.

I know you're trolling, but just so you don't mislead others, I need to point out that while there's a lot of variation in tech blogger credentials, there are people out there that are more than qualified. Off the top of my head, I know that Anandtech's cpu/mobo reviewer, Ian Cutress, has his doctorate and has literally written academic papers and shit. Don't get me wrong. There are always people like techreport's Scott Wasson, who only has an undergrad business degree (and I never let him forget it), but the qualified writers are out there if that's something that matters to readers.

 

Haha, as if we had Microcenter prices over here. Bang for the buck is nice, but I don't enjoy investing in two year old technology.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-intel-skylake-core-i5-6600k-review
Skylake i5, best chip ever.

 

mine is up and running.

had great struggle getting the old megahalems on the CPU, but it's working perfect now.

One thing that bugs me:The Asus "bios"
-Either the Asus "bios" does not handle additional option-roms at all/badly or I broke my pcie sata controller card when I cleaned it :/
-there's tons of settings with custom names that aren't explained anywhere

I syspreped before changing the board and windows handled it fine, just my user account is pretty messed now.

 

Did you have to reactivate your windows after changing motherboard+CPU? Did you switch to an UEFI install? How's the performance jump? :D

 

I had to reactivate and reenter my key.
I'm in legacy mode, gotta look up how much hassle changing to UEFI would be.
I have only played a bit of rust yesterday night and it's a different world, performancewise. Before I could only run on medium settings and had ~40 fps most of the time, GPU TDP was never used for more than 68%. Now I have a constant 89 to 99 FPS, GPU is used up to 90% TDP. The weird thing: CPU core usage has dropped :eek:. I had all 4 cores under full load in rust on the q9550, on the 6600k it's around 50%.

Gotta try Cities Skylines today (high Cim pops!)

 

performance jump with UEFI? You mean start times? Meh its a bit faster... not world shattering... at least under windows 7 anyways. Then again win7 doesn't take advantage of it like 8 and up do. Fucking linux uses uefi like a bitch. I read somewhere you can run a kernel directly through UEFI.

 

For varying interpretations of "run a kernel"; you're going to have to be a bit more detailed. You've always been able to "run a kernel" through the BIOS in the sense of bootstrap one up. Or do you mean directly inject a Linux kernel into the UEFI firmware?

 

Nah, I meant the general performance jump with his new CPU. But yes, the UEFI boot times are nice. As far as I remember, clean installs on UEFI are a bitch or maybe that changed in the last months.

 

Even in bios compatibility mode it only takes ~ 10 seconds from power button to windows login screen, and that's with a 3 second delay so grumpy old people like me can get into the bios on first try.

 

It was wasn't a bootstrap as far as I remember. I just did a search but, I didn't come up with anything that seemed right so, I may have misinterpreted it.

 

From FanlessTech: "EXCLUSIVE: Skylake-U lineup."

• 15 W Skylake-U overview slide
• 15 W Skylake-U specifications slide
• 28 W Skylake roadmap slide

 

Now I know what sysprep is, unfortunately now it's too late and my Win7 reboots while booting.
Hunting for those missing drivers will take some time and I don't want to reinstall just because I changed my CPU+motherboard!

 

Alright, got those AHCI drivers installed with a little googling.
Problem solved, everything working, now for some benchmarks!

Dat boot time :D

 

The only things I still struggle with:

• Aida64 and Asus Software report differnt temperatures
• Asus Software blocks Aida 64 from reading Mobo temp and tCase
• Asus Software detects my fans in a weird manner
• "Driver ACPI returned invalid ID for a child device (5)." I guess that is caused by my C-State settings. But no crashes from it so far.

McGyver, I would have rather done it your way. Sysprep enabled a ton of shitty services:

• Readyboost starts and crashes on every windows reboot. I should be disabled completely, but it still gets logged as a crash
• Windows Backup reports "Backup your files!!" a day before the sheduled backup runs automatically.
• ....

I'll update this when I remember more hidden horrors ove:

 

I was actually pretty shocked when my first search results on my rebooting problem were stuff like "reinstall windows". I had to input a two line command I had never seen in the console to get my drivers copied over. But I plan to reinstall everything anyways, as soon as I get the motivation and have my stuff backuped.

The chip itself is great, the whole system consumes now only 30W in idle, that's almost laptop territory!

The new ASUS Bios is really not user friendly in advanced mode. Took me some time to find the stuff that is relevant to me. Here is a great guide from ASUS on overclocking with their boards: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz2VRRbLPrZnMXBnOXRWeVlHcHM/view?pli=1

 

Yesterday bios version 0301 came out. It will overwrite your current settings and profiles. You can savely start the update from within windows.

 

I have the cheaper Z170-P board and for that the one month old BIOS is still the newest.