Well ladies and gentlemen there you have it. Intel's latest 7th generation aka Kaby Lake looks at first glance as a small evolution in processing power. Indeed we were a bit intrigued by the fact that there were no logical Instructions Per Clock gains to be detected. Was that needed? Not really, but one expects from a new generation that something has to be better in regards of its predecessors. In return Intel has upped the clocks by a fair amount.

The Redmond Giant has deviated from their own heralded Tick - Tock mechanism before and that will be why many talk about a Devils Canyon revisited. Well it might look like it, but it is not exactly true. Devils Canyon was great on paper as it was Intel's first 4Ghz desktop processor, but a decent Haswell CPU could clock as high if not higher than the DC counterpart. On more exotic cooling Devils Canyon was blown away by its predecessor, even though the marketing promised the inverse. Intel has learned from the past and is not making the same mistake here.

Yes they did a similar frequency increase with Kaby Lake, but this generation has got plenty of unlocked power under the hood: it is up to you to unleash the real beast. Kaby Lake is logically a tiny bit more energy efficient at out of the box speeds, But this has a far bigger effect in the mobile segment than on the desktop platform.

Only thing one has to worry about is how to keep these crunching monsters cooled when aiming for that magical 5GHz frequency for daily usage. Delidding is probably the option to just achieve that, though there are rumours that Intel is able to improve on short term the quality of the silicon for even higher daily clocks.

Second good thing is that we don't need to upgrade our motherboards to the latest Z270 chipset, this processor generation runs fine on the Z170 platform (after a BIOS update), a chipset which has matured well over the last year. If you need to have all the functions Kaby Lake will allow the new chipset is needed.

Besides the increased clocks and superb overclock headroom, the en/decoding strength of the new HD 630 is probably the biggest asset of the new Kaby Lake generation. Supporting HDCP 2.2, Playready 3.0 from Microsoft and able to encode or decode VP9, even in 4K 10-bit HEVC. Question is will many desktop users use this platform to do just that? Maybe again more for the mobile segment, though it is nice to have those features under the hood. Let the HD 630 handle those 4K streams, it will be a delight!

So what's the deal here, some might say not really a big deal. Well it is all about refinements made to an already amazing CPU generation. I see no real need to start upgrading to Kaby Lake if you own a modern powerful CPU like the Haswell series, as always it will depend on your specific needs and the system you are currently gaming/working on, though this CPU generation is a perfect blend of some nifty new features integrated inside the HD 630 iGPU, an improved Memory Controller and the combination of them sick clock speeds from Sandy Bridge with the performance benefits of the Sky Lake generation. What's not to like?

Though it is hard to give a specific award, consider the Kaby Lake as a refresh of its predecessor with some extra refinements. The increase in clock speeds and available overclock headroom easily make up for the lack of IPC improvement. We can vouch that it truly performs and it makes Intel claim the title of the fastest mainstream desktop processor once again.

We wish to thank Gina and Bernice from Gigabyte for the Z270X Gaming 7 AORUS review sample. Kuddos ladies, we owe you (again) Hopefully we can update the current article soon with some nice pictures and hardcore footage from CES Las Vegas and update the database with other Kaby Lake models.

Thanks to Nils from Seasonic for the Snow Silent PSU and the Tones crew for the years of support!

Technik PR for the Be Quiet Silent Loop 240 series