The Core i7-7700K ($350) is part of Intel's seventh-generation Kaby Lake desktop processor family. These chips feature the same hardware decoding engine for 4K streaming from services like Netflix and other streaming providers that was packed into the mobile processors in the same Kaby Lake family. And Intel has managed to raise the base clock of this Core i7 chip to 4.2GHz, compared with the 4GHz base clock of the Core i7-6700K it's supplanting. That helps propel the Core i7-7700K to new performance levels for this class of processors. But that performance is more or less in line with the low-double-digit percent gains we saw in mobile seventh-generation chips. In other words, if you have a high-end Skylake chip, or even a Broadwell or Haswell i7, there may not be a compelling reason to upgrade—at least right away. But what about overclocking, and the new 200-series chipsets that roll out with these processors as well? For that, we'll need to delve a little deeper. We'll do that...
Intel's "Kaby Lake" Core i7 flagship is speedy, with hardware support for 4K streaming and HDR for services like Netflix, but performance gains over its previous-generation counterpart are fairly minimal.
Fastest CPU available; Hardware support for HDR and 4K streaming; Modest overclocking improvements
Minimal speed upgrade over previous-generation flagship Core i7 chip