Our Minimum, Entry, and Modest tiers have been updated with Intel’s Skylake Celeron and Pentium CPUs. These are cheap, low-tier CPUs that are decent for a tight budget.
Our Minimum, Entry, and Modest tiers have been updated with Intel’s Skylake Celeron and Pentium CPUs. These are cheap, low-tier CPUs that are decent for a tight budget.
Intel’s Skylake Pentium G4400 has been added to our Modest tier.
New PC hardware releases (and falling prices on older hardware) have caused a lot of small updates to our PC parts recommendations. This update focuses on improving our recommendations in the mid-range tiers. There are a lot of small updates, so let us take them category by category.
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.
Aside from Black Friday, Christmas and the holiday season is typically the next best time of year to buy PC hardware. Between Christmas sales and retailers selling off end-of-year loss leaders, there are ample opportunities to score on upgrades or new builds.
With that in mind, we want to provide some insight on what’s a good purchase for Christmas 2015, and what you should hold off on purchasing.
Intel’s latest CPU family, Skylake, has just launched with two new CPUs (the i5-6600K and i7-6700K), a new socket (1151), and a new chipset family for motherboard (Z170). These CPUs are on the 14nm manufacturing process, which is not strictly new (their previous generation, Broadwell, was on 14nm dies), but new when it comes to mass-market availability.
How well do these new CPUs perform? After analyzing reviews (linked below), it looks as though, unfortunately, Intel has decided to forgo CPU improvements and focus on the integrated GPU.