Skylake-X's mixed fortunes in gaming performance aren't quite what we wanted to see - and all the evidence suggests that the existing Haswell-E and Broadwell-E processors are still great performers - but the sense is that more forward-looking engines will make more of the new architecture. Meanwhile, the overclocking potential is also remarkable, even if the real-world improvement to gaming is minimal beyond the now-standard all-core turbo deployed by all board manufacturers. But for gaming, while there are some noticeable gains, there is no real knock-out blow for the mainstream Core i7 chips, while comparisons with Haswell-E and Broadwell-E show that Intel's older many-core processors can still do the business. The Skylake-X price-cuts to the eight and ten-core processors are nice, but there is the sense that the enthusiast premium is still too much bearing in mind the change in market conditions, while continuing to cut-off PCI Express lane availability continues to come off as quite mean - something that must surely be coming to an end now AMD is offering access to all lanes for all processors across its range.

Regardless, out of all the chips reviewed here, while the 7900X and 7820X are perhaps the sexiest offerings, the six-core Core i7 7800X at $390 is the only processor I would seriously consider buying for myself - it offers a lot more processing power than a quad for a relatively small premium, beats Ryzen on gaming, and it should be broadly competitive in productivity tasks too, though you may need to overclock to get the job done there.

Core i9 7900X/ i7 7820X/ i7 7800X/ i7 7740X - stock clocks, though all-core turbo may be active (even though we turned it off)

00:02 - Ashes of the Singularity CPU Test
01:37 - The Division
03:13 - The Witcher 3
04:05 - Rise of the Tomb Raider
04:46 - Far Cry Primal
05:35 - Assassin's Creed Unity
06:43 - Crysis 3

Clock-For-Clock 4.4GHz Comparisons: Core i7 7820X vs 6900K vs 5960X

09:00 - Ashes of the Singularity CPU Test
10:35 - The Division
12:11 - The Witcher 3
13:03 - Rise of the Tomb Raider
13:44 - Far Cry Primal
14:33 - Assassin's Creed Unity
15:41 - Crysis 3