Intel's upcoming Core i7-6850K six-core processor made its way to the hands of an enthusiast on OCN, who wasted no time in picturing the chip, and putting it through a few handy tests. Built for the LGA2011v3 socket, the i7-6850K is based on the 14 nm "Broadwell-E" silicon, and features six cores, HyperThreading enabling 12 logical CPUs, 15 MB of L3 cache, and a nominal clock speed of 3.60 GHz. To begin with, while the i7-6850K is pin-compatible with existing socket LGA2011v3 motherboards (and logically features an identical pin-map to "Haswell-E,") the package is slightly different. Its fiberglass substrate is slightly thinner (1.12 mm vs. 1.87 mm of "Haswell-E,"). Its thickness is made up for by a chunkier IHS (integrated heatspreader).

The i7-6850K sample was installed on a machine with ASRock X99 Extreme3 motherboard (BIOS: P3.30), 16 GB of quad-channel DDR4-2133 memory, and a single GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card. It was compared to a Core i7-5820K processor on the same setup. The i7-6850K based setup was barely (~1%) faster at 3DMark FireStrike Extreme in its final score, however, its CPU-intensive Physics score was 14.9% higher. Moving on to the community favorite Cinebench R15, the i7-6850K yielded a 10% higher score. To test its single-core performance, the chip was put through SuperPi 32M, where the i7-6850K crunched through the test in 8m 27.854s, compared to 8m 38.866s by the i7-5820K.