Intel i5 6500

PRICE: $290 • URL: WWW.INTEL.COM

Intel unleashed a new generation of CPUs on us in 2015, in the form of the Skylake design. Unfortunately, it seemed to simply be a lick of paint compared to the prior CPU, with the exception of the integrated GPU, which underwent a significant performance increase. That’s wonderful if you’re looking to play the latest F2P MMO on your All-in-One, but serious gamers disable the integrated GPU and use a discrete GPU instead, making Skylake much ado about nothing. The core CPU performance was only minimally increased over its predecessor, by around 7% or so at best. It was all a bit of a snooze-fest, until a few naughty motherboard makers figured out that Skylake supported ye olde school method of overclocking, Base-clock overclocking.

A series of hacked BIOS were released in December, allowing the Z170 motherboards to overclock any Intel CPU, not just those with the pricey K designation at the end of their product name. Suddenly Intel’s I5 6500 became a damn good buy, as its quad cores could be overclocked to 4.4GHz with hardly any effort – that’s a lovely 20% increase over the default speed of 3.6GHz, which translates to a direct 20% improvement in games where the CPU is the limiting factor. I spent a little time with one of these chips, and soon hit 4.32GHz without any problems, and I’m sure I could have hit 4.5GHz if I’d had a little more time. Note that if you want to follow in my footsteps, you’re going to have to track down these special unofficial hacked BIOS versions, as Intel has kicked up quite a stink regarding motherboard vendors unlocking this feature, so you won’t find anything on the official motherboard websites.