2017 Hardware Thread

PCIe 4.0 specification finally out with 16 GT/s on tap - The Tech Report

PCIe 5.0 Arriving in 2019 With 4x More Bandwidth Than PCIe 3.0 - ExtremeTech

Which kind of GPUs are they planning for ? I don't know if even best ones now can choke on 3.0.

essenbe said:

I look forward to it. But I seriously hope it serves you well. I know you have been waiting on the Surface Pro for quite a while. The specs on this one look to be excellent. Hopefully it will be better than the Surface Pro.

Yeah, I'm gonna kick myself silly if MS releases a new Surface Book Pro 2 soon and it's all I think it'll be. Really did love the ability to remove the screen and use it as a tablet. Oh well. I don't think I did bad with the ThinkPad though.

@ Cliff S, thanks :)

solarstarshines said:

This guy got a sample already wow
The overclocking is what makes X299 attractive but finding a decent mobo that isn't going to be as much as the chip might be hard to do

Hmmm... they're calling that a "Skylake"??? That's going to be confusing as hell. I was under the impression Kaby replaced Skylake. Now we have a new chip called Skylake-X

sygnus21 said:

Hmmm... they're calling that a "Skylake"??? That's going to be confusing as hell. I was under the impression Kaby replaced Skylake. Now we have a new chip called Skylake-X

But, we also have a Kaby Lake-X

Those are just, in reality, Intel's Internal project names and has always been that way. There was Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell and Broadwell. For the enthusiast platform they just added an E on the end, so you had Haswell-E and Broadwell E. The only thing actually changed was instead of adding an E they have added an X instead. You will really go by the CPU number, such as the i7-7900X or the i7-7740X.


Yes, there were exceptions where the top chip was designated X, but now they are just all X's.

sygnus21 said:

Hmmm... they're calling that a "Skylake"??? That's going to be confusing as hell. I was under the impression Kaby replaced Skylake. Now we have a new chip called Skylake-X

essenbe said:

But, we also have a Kaby Lake-X

From what I understood(and I am probably totally wrong, Steve please correct me, I don't wanna die stupid(german saying)):
The Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X are the same chip dies, just place on another PCB, needing a new/better socket. They are then re-tuned, and have different/better d-pars & SMB's.

Well, I never really delved into the details, but supposedly Kaby Lake was just an overclocked Skylake. If you believe that, it should follow that Kaby Lake X and Skylake X would be pretty much the same, I guess. I do recall hearing somewhere that they were supposed to have improved IPC's, so maybe there are some improvements to the X series. In the end, I guess we don't really know the answer until they are released. Until then, it is all speculation.