So is Skylake already a failure?

[Matt Boehm]

I was waiting on Skylake to build my computer but reading various reviews it doesn't seem to impress at all now that it's out. Is it already a failure? Should I just go with a 4790K?

 

[Darkbreeze]

The benchmarks, synthetic, real world and gaming, tell a different story. Ten top review sites including Tom's Hardware really can't be wrong, so I seriously doubt it's "a lot better" than the 4790k. Fact is, it's about the same. The only real differences are a few more PCI lanes to allow some room for storage and add in device configurations and the use of DDR4, which is also a seemingly non-factor so far. I too just ordered a Skylake build, but I did so knowing it wasn't going to be "a lot", or really "any", better than Haswell Refresh.

Mainly I did it to avoid the need to purchase DDR4 on any later builds or upgrades and for the additional lanes. Also to give myself the option of upgrading to CanonLake when it's released if it shows any substantial improvements over Skylake.

 

[spentshells]

As bmacsys said, intel cpu's don't drop in price.

Given that it's now November, and the 4790k is about 75-90 bucks cheaper than it was in August, and the 4690k is about fifty bucks cheaper from the same time frame, it would seem that no longer holds true. Previously it was pretty well known that they didn't drop in price even after newer releases arrived, but this time it seems to have dropped a fair amount, all things considered.

I would assume this is because there are a pile of them sitting in stock.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Probably. It almost certain that a lot of people DIDN'T upgrade to Haswell Refresh because they were under the impression that Broadwell was going to release, which never materialized in the way it was intimated it would, so now they're either optioned to go with Skylake or an older, but still comparable in performance, HR system. Since a high number of enthusiasts "have" to have the latest tech, even with no discernable processing performance advantage (not including new features here, just performance), this probably leaves more surplus inventory than what would normally still be sticking around by the time a new platform has gained widespread availability.

Or they just want to get rid of a bunch of inventory all at once so they can invest in higher numbers of newer part numbers.