I'm busy upgrading my desktop to the new Kaby Lake i7-7700K plus an Asus Z270-A m/board. It's Intel's fastest i7 so far and overclocks easily to around 5ghz. That may be "the wall" for silicon CPU speeds for the forseeable future for reasons I'll explain later.

Cyberlink worked with Intel in the early days and, according to my contact at Intel, Intel wrote all of the code for Power Dirctor to make use of the early versons of Intel HD Graphics and Quicksync. Many pro NLEs like Adobe, Davinci Resolve, GV Edius 8, etc have also added Intel Graphics support and the latest Edius 8 claims a 5X increase in render speed using Quicksync vs CPU render - much faster than I see with PDR.

The new i7 Kaby Lake comes with Intel 630 graphics which is an upgrade from the 530 Skylake graphics and has some powerful features for editing software as you can see here:

The Kaby Lake-U/Y GPU - Media Capabilities

"Full hardware acceleration for encode and decode of 4K HEVC (H.265) Main10 profile videos." Unfortunately most software has a long way to go to make full use of the 630 graphics - with one exception - Magix, who now owns the well known Sony Vegas edit software, and worked with Intel to develop the latest verson of their edit software and claim 4k 360 editing using Kaby Lake.

How Magix Made 4K 360 Video Editing Swift and Easy

Let's hope PDR does the same.

Now back to "the wall". I'm sure many users share my disappointment in Intel's upgrade path over the past few years. Moore's Law has died and "Tick/Tock" is no more, making it increasingly difficult to decide if and when to upgrade your PC. The press often blames Intel for the lack of progress due to lack of competition - but we may be reaching the limits of silicon technology. We once saw 50% performance improvements annually. Now we see 5-6% due more to refinements than technology breakthroughs. There are actually three walls limiting technology We will see smaller more efficient cpus as Intel moves from 14nm to 10nm to 7nm over the next few years but not much faster.

The future of computers - Part 1: Multicore and the Memory Wall

The myths of Moore’s law

So after posponing an upgrade for three years I'm looking at the following:

• i7 7700K water cooled


• Asus Prime Z270-A m/board (great for o/clock)


• 32 Gb DDR4 3200


• SSD Samsung 960 M.2 512GB (3,500mb/sec read)


• 2x 2TB WD Blue 7200rpm


• A second 24"HD monitor -can't justify UHD cost for 24"screen

Comments welcome

Al Power Director 13&14 Ultimate, Photo Director 6, Audio Dir, Pwr2Go 10
Win 10 64, Intel MB DH87MC, Intel i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16Gb DDR3 1600, 128Gb SSD, 2x1Tb WDBlue 7200rpmSATA6, Intel 4600 GPU, Gigabyte G1 GTX960 4GB, LG BluRay Writer