Conclusion

In this article we compared the Intel Core i7-6700K at stock clocks as well as overclocked to 4.5 GHz to the Core i5-6600K also at standard clock speeds as well as overclocked to 4.5 GHz in recent games. When comparing our overall averages, which you can find on page 9, we see that there is a near as no difference when it comes to frames per second in recent games. The two CPUs allow for almost identical frame rates with a tiny advantage for the i7-6700K. When overclocking these two CPUs the performance advatage of the Core i7-6700K is still only about 1% and therefore simply insignificant.

Apart from the performance benefits overclocking brings to your system, power consumption we increase by quite a bit depending on your CPU. If you keep things like Intels Turbo active, then the CPU will downclock, when there is no load and the CPU will also change the voltage to a lower value. This results in good energy efficiency when the system is in idle. For these test we simply bumped the multiplier to 45 and we didn't change any other parameter, leaving the motherboard and CPU in control of changing voltages. In idle the power consumption overclocked and stock are identical in the case of the Core i7-6700K, whereas the Core i5-6600K needed quite a bit less power when running stock, as you can see on page 7. Comparing the power consumption of the system when it's once equipped with the Core i7-6700K and afterwards with the Core i5-6600K, reveals a rather significant difference. Especially when the Core i7-6700K is overclocked power consumption goes up compared to the i5-6600K. Therefore comparing the two systems with overclocked CPUs shows, that the one with a Core i7-6700K draws about 19% more power.

Bottom line, there is virtually no performance difference between the Core i7-6700K and the Core i5-6600K and it doesn't matter whether you overclock the CPU or not. In other words it also means it doesn't matter if you have CPU with four cores and four threads or one with eight threads for gaming. Buying a Core i7-6700K over a Core i7-6600K makes sense if you do a lot of video encoding or you run other applications which require a lot of processing power from numerous threads. In the case of gaming it still looks like four cores with four threads are sufficient. Looking at the price reveals another good reason to decide in favor of the smaller CPU, whereas the Core i7-6700K costs 348 Euro these days and the Core i5-6600K sells for 233 Euro.