Since the introduction of AMD's Zen CPU architecture to the market, communities, consumers and media outlets have been abuzz from all of the hype; not just the hype prior to the launch, but of course performance upon release too. It's been no surprise that AMD's Ryzen processor launch has been a success due to the price/performance ratio of their processors, more impressively the Ryzen 7 range with the 1700 being one of the top core/performance/price effective processors of the last 5 or 6 years. The big question from most people however was ?how are Intel going to respond??. Well Intel made their response well known from the outset and decided to bring forward the launch of their latest HEDT platform based on the X299 chipset, with the processors being codenamed ?Skylake-X??