It’s Time: Skylake CPUs Replace Haswell on Logical Increments

The time has come for Intel’s Skylake CPUs to (almost completely) replace Haswell on the Logical Increments parts list. As a result, we have upgraded many of our motherboard recommendations to socket 1151, and our RAM recommendations to DDR4.

Intel’s Skylake series of CPUs launched back in August 2015 with the i5-6600K and i7-6700K. But until now, we had mainly continued to recommend many of the company’s 4000-series Haswell CPUs because the prices were better, and performance was nearly as good.

Now, Skylake CPUs have become the more logical choice. That’s partly thanks to prices leveling out, and partly due to many Haswell-compatible motherboards going out of stock or raising in price to absurd levels.

The Skylake CPUs now featured on Logical Increments:

• i5-6400 (new addition)
• i5-6500 (new addition)
• i5-6600 (new addition)
• i5-6600K
• i7-6700K

The Haswell CPUs retired from the Logical Increments parts list:

• i5-4460
• i5-4590
• i5-4690
• i5-4690K
• i7-4790K

These CPUs are still good, and they are still available for normal prices. However, we have replaced them with (slightly better) Skylake upgrades because suitable motherboards have become very difficult to find.

The socket 1150 motherboards we were recommending for Haswell CPUs were either out of stock for several weeks, or available for twice the usual price, making them illogical purchases.

For the i3 Haswell, suitable 1150 motherboards are still commonly available for normal prices, so we will not switch to i3 Skylake CPUs yet.

With these changes, overall tier prices have not changed, since they were similarly priced replacements available, so these changes are not really drastic.

We expect the next really big changes to come in Q2 or Q3 of this year, when NVIDIA and AMD should both be releasing new GPUs. Then, later in Q4, AMD is scheduled to release its Zen CPUs.

2016 is shaping up to be an exciting year!