While most of us were busy swooning at the new Extreme Edition flagship Broadwell-E, the deca-core i7 6950X, we would be forgiven for not paying quite as much attention to the other three SKUs that were launched on the same day. The most affordable of the HEDT famiy is the i7 6800K, a hexa-core slab of Broadwell-E that retails for a more reasonable price of around $500. Is it any good? How does it compare to previous generation alternatives, and how well does it overclock? The guys over at WCCFtech have all the answers we seek, overclocking and comparing the i7 6800K.

“We wanted to find the baseline so we set the XMP of the memory and ran through all of the tests, then we went for a mild overclock and settled on 4.2GHz at 1.22v as it was relatively easy to hit and didn’t give us much trouble. Going past 4.2GHz is when things started getting a bit funky for us, requiring more voltage than we wanted to put through it and generating a massive amount of heat that was quickly overwhelming the Silverstone TD02-lite 240mm AIO that we were using for these tests. But, we eventually settled on a 4.4GHz overclock at 1.4v.”

Reviewer Keith May goes on to test the i7 6800K at both stock, 4.2GHz and 4.4GHz, running benchmarks that include HWBOT x265 1080p, XTU, Cinebech R15, Firestrike Physics and Geekbench 3. His conclusions include details about power draw at different configurations and an overview of how the chip scales.

Catch the full article plus a companion video on WCCFTech.