On January 3rd 2017 Intel launched the new 7000 series Kaby Lake processors and matching Intel 200 series chipset. For the enthusiast this includes the Core i7 7700K processor and Z270 chipset but, encompasses a number of processors in the range. On the surface the new technology is just a process improvement over Skylake with a 200Mhz speed bump and 4x more PCI Express lanes added to the chipset.
The question{s} asked in this podcast are, “What does that mean?" and "Should we upgrade??” Over the past several months quite a few things have changed which can influence this decision. We have better M.2 SSD options on the market and the emergence of U.2 SSDs means there will be a push to have better support. This also means that the extra PCI Express lanes are finally beneficial. We also have the change in NVIDIA SLI which has gotten rid of 4-way SLI in favor of only 2-way (two GPUS) which has changed how the 16x PCI Express slots are organized. Impacts of these are both present in the EVGA Z270 Classified motherboard which is a big deal in the enthusiast world.
On top of the motherboard changes there is also a HUGE improvement to overclocking performance, and by huge I mean 7Ghz under LN2 and 5Ghz on water. Those sorts of numbers are really exciting to see especially considering how “meh” CPU overclocking has been since the launch of the LGA 115x.
