$289.99 now. The i5 6600K went down to $199.99.The $110 savings on the CPU + $50-70 on the mobo + $20-25 savings on fast 2x8GB DDR4 sticks over 4x4GB DDR4 sticks for X99 +
$30-50 savings on a CPU cooler gets us close to going i7 6700K + GTX1080 (or 1070 SLI) vs. an i7 6800K + GTX1070. Skylake is a clear winner for those who primarily game.
:thumbsup: Even SKL-X may not be the answer. If you assume someone wanted a cutting edge gaming CPU regardless of cost, they would have purchased an i7 6700K in Q4 2015 and enjoyed it for almost 2 years before SKL-X arrives. The same gamer would be better off waiting for Icelake and skipping SLK-X entirely. Unless games start to use 6-8 cores or benefit greatly from increased cache, a 6-12 core SLK-X won't really be faster than the 6700K. At least during the i7 6700K vs. i7 5820K days, the latter could be justified/recommended due to price premiums for fast DDR4 and inflated pricing of 6700K. Now it the completely opposite scenario where Skylake platform with fast DDR4 is not only faster, but it's cheaper.
Did they use AVX in their stress testing? Looking at average 6700K overclocking across 20-30 sites shows 4.5-4.8Ghz, with some hitting 4.85-4.9Ghz. You are using the best case scenario and ignoring that average overclocks for BW-E are all well below the average overclocks for SKL. If you want to use the best overclocks for BW-E, you need to compare them to the best overclocks for 6700K then.
HW Canucks achived 4.85Ghz on the 6700K on a $130 board. MicroCenter has an even higher end Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 5 model for $137 after bundling it with the 6700K. This board has 2x Ultra M.2 32GB/sec ports that can be set up in RAID too.
SiliconLottery is selling 6800K/6850K @ 4.2-4.4Ghz and 6900K @ 4.2-4.4Ghz. This suggests the average overclock on BW-E is actually 4.2-4.4Ghz.
i7 6700K @ 4.8Ghz for
$449
i7 6850K @ 4.5Ghz for
$769.
4.5Ghz even on a 6-core BW-E is pretty rare it seems. Once you take pricing into account, it's a complete fail unless one needs the extra cores for rendering/video encoding, etc. I didn't even add the price of a CPU cooler into the equation. It won't be possible to get those 4.4-4.5Ghz on BW-E with a $20 cooler.