Hot on the heel of his Kaby Lake overclocking article last week where he dissected the newest Intel platform in meticulous detail, French OC maestro Wizerty has just published a follow up article. Published again on Tom’s Hardware, Wizerty compares Kaby Lake and Skylake predecessors when overclocked on different platform motherboards. Questions answered in the article include: Is Kaby Lake worth investing from an Overclocking fun perspective? Is it essential to have a Z270 motherboard, or will a Z170 board give me the same performance and overclocking experience? Plenty to chew over.

Wizerty starts by examining the two platforms from a chipset perspective. For comparison purposes he selected a pair of MSI boards; the MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium and its updated younger brother, the Z270A XPOWER Titanium. His testing revolves as you might expect around the top CPU SKUs of each generation – the Core i7 6700K and the Core i7 7700K. Wizerty then compares the BIOSes of the two boards side by side, including the difference in memory and other settings.

He then offers performance comparison data focusing on the differences between the two CPUs when used with Z170 and Z270 motherboards. Although the two chipsets offer generally comparable performance, there are a few spots where minor differences are apparent. Finally he compares data related to the two chips in overclocked configurations, including how the two chipset platforms perform in terms of voltages and thermals.

You can catch the article from Wizerty here on Tom’s Hardware. The article is written in French, but thanks to the power of Google Translate, that is no longer a problem for non-French speaking people like myself.