Although plenty of leaks and rumors have deflated any of the suspense from the announcement, Intel has finally brought their newest generation of enthusiast and professional-grade parts to the market, in the form of Broadwell-E.
The particular speeds and feeds of this latest crop of CPU’s has been known for some time now, but what we weren’t completely sure of was pricing and availability. With Intel’s announcement, however, we can finally nail down all the details: Broadwell-E will have an entry price of $434 in the Core i7 6800K, which is a hexa-core part that comes with 3.4/3.6GHz base/boost clocks, 15MB of L3 cache, and 28 PCI-E lanes. The step-up hexa-core part, the 6850K, will cost $617 – $183 more – but have faster 3.6/3.8GHz base/boost speeds, as well as those oft-coveted 40 PCI-E lanes.
From there, pricing scales upward even faster: The 6900K provides an octa-core chip with 3.2/3.7GHz base/boost speeds for $1089, and the 6950X Extreme Edition (pictured) represents the first ten-core desktop chip ever sold by Intel, with 25MB of L3 cache and 3.0/3.5GHz base/boost speeds costing customers a cool $1723. Perhaps that gold lettering on the box is actual gold?
Some of the prices may give enthusiasts pause, but at least those who are interested in these chips won’t have to wait any longer to get them – Intel says that availability of Broadwell-E is immediate, and a quick visit to Newegg demonstrates that you can indeed order (or at least backorder) parts now.
As far as motherboards go, Broadwell-E is thankfully backwards-compatible with existing X99 LGA2011v3 boards (though some will require updates to be compatible), but we’ll be scanning reports from Computex to see if any new boards are released to coincide with the introduction of this newer silicon by Intel.
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