It’s taken its sweet time coming, and yet finally the pricing details have arrived for the imminent launch of Intel’s new Kaby Lake family of processors. The seventh generation Core CPUs are spearheaded by the high-end Intel Core i7-7700K, the fastest processor. The i7-7700K will be coming in at a pretty reasonable $349, and as per the 'K' suffix will be unlocked to enable out-of-the-box overclocking. The Core i7-7700K is quad-core CPU with eight threads, clocked at 4.2 GHz base clock. It’s joined by 8MB L3 cache and guzzles down 91W TDP. It’s the best of the bunch but also the most expensive. Things get a little cheaper as we head through the currently announced Kaby Lake chips. The flagship i5 model, the 7600K, can be had for $239. This one’s quad-core with single-threading, clocked at 3.8 GHz. It has a slightly lower 6MB L3 cache yet has the same 91W TDP. Down at the lower-end of the family the current cheapest Intel Kaby Lake CPU according to available pricing is the Core i5-7400. It can be had for $189 and is a little pared down compared to the 7600K, particularly considering we’re only talking a $50 price difference. Again it’s quad-core, yet base clock is just 3.0GHz, and of course it isn’t unlocked for overclocking.
| Cpu | Cores / Threads | Clock Speed | L3 Cache | Price |
| Intel Core i7-7700K | 4/8 | 4.2 GHz | 8MB | $349 |
| Intel Core i7-7700 | 4/8 | 3.6 GHz | 8MB | $309 |
| Intel Core i5-7600K | 4/4 | 3.8 GHz | 6MB | $239 |
| Intel Core i5-7600 | 4/4 | 3.5 GHz | 6MB | $219 |
| Intel Core i5-7500 | 4/4 | 3.4 GHz | 6MB | $199 |
| Intel Core i5-7400 | 4/4 | 3.0 GHz | 6MB | $189 |
Along with this there will also be a few other Kaby Lake chips down at the entry tier, including some i3 CPUs and a few Pentium models, but pricing is not currently available. If you’re thinking of picking up an Intel Kaby Lake CPU then you will need a LGA1151 compatible motherboard. The only previous chipset to support LGA1151 is the last-gen Skylake, and I doubt anything here is worth an upgrade for current Skylake owners. Switching to Kaby Lake therefore might require a hefty upgrade on your part, however you are then future proofed for Cannonlake support when that drops late next year. These CPUs will be manufactured on the 10nm process (compared to 14nm Kaby Lake) and should in theory be a more sizable jump in performance.
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