Intel Core i7-5775C Broadwell Processor Review

Intel’s Broadwell launch has been quite interesting to say the least. If you can remember when we first heard of Broadwell its was rumored that it would not be a socketed processor, but rather it would come in the BGA package. On top of this rumor the actual launch of Broadwell was supposed to happen last year at the same time as the 9 Series chipset. Intel decided to delay the launch of its Broadwell processors till they were officially announced at Computex last month, luckily we did get socketed processors! Broadwell will be the “tick” in Intel’s “tick-tock” release schedule which we have seen for many years now where a “tick” is a node shrink of a previous microarchitecture and a “tock” is a new microarchitecture. The previous microarchitecture was Haswell at 22nm at now Broadwell will be 14nm. On top of just the node shrink Intel has really tried to focus on power efficiency, meaning that they are looking shooting for better performance using less power. Intel has also added their Iris Pro 6200 integrated graphics on the chip, which is a first for a socketed processor. On top of that the processor is fully unlocked and features 128 MB of eDRAM for the Iris Pro Graphics, which can also be overclocked.

Broadwell comes at a very weird time for consumers as well. We have heard that Intel could be launching their Skylake processors and 100 Series chipset at Gamescom in August. Skylake will be the “tock” in Intel’s release schedule. So consumers could get Broadwell with a 9 Series motherboard or just wait a little bit for a Skylake processor with a 100 Series board. Having just a few months between launches does not give a lot of time for Intel to really push Broadwell or even get it out into the channel. As of writing this it is quite hard to find Broadwell Desktop processors at major online retailers.

Today we will be taking a look at the flagship processor in the Broadwell desktop processor line, the i7-5775C. This quad-core processor has a base CPU frequency of 3.3 GHz with a turbo boost up to 3.7 GHz. While this might be slower than the 4770K it achieves this with far less power and has much more powerful integrated graphics.

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If we take a look at the die map we can see that half of the actual chip is actually taken up by the integrated graphics. You can tell that was a very big focus for Intel on Broadwell. The Iris Pro 6200 graphics features 48 execution units and 128 MB of overclockable eDRAM running at 1800 MHz.

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Here are quick shots of the processor before we put it in our test system!

Intel Core i7-5775C

Intel Core i7-5775C

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