Intel Core i5 6500: A Great Skylake CPU For $200, Works Well On Linux

Well, those are the tests I've been able to carry out so far in the few days I've had the Core i5 6500 since buying it from Amazon.com. Overall I'm quite happy with the purchase given the performance offered by this quad-core CPU. In a majority of the tests, the Core i5 6500 was significantly faster than AMD's similarly-priced FX-8370 CPU. The i5-6500 also proved to be a measurable upgrade over the older mid-range i5-4670 Haswell and i5-2500K Sandy Bridge processors. Even in some of the tests this Skylake CPU did better than the higher-end i7-4790K Haswell CPU.

When it comes to the HD Graphics 530, they're a step ahead of Haswell's HD Graphics, but is just good enough for some situations on Linux as outlined on the previous page. If you want more compelling graphics capabilities, the CPUs with Iris Graphics like the Core i7 5775C are obviously much superior.

At the end of the day I'm happy with the Core i5 6500 and its offering of great performance for being a $200 processor if you're to build a Skylake system on a budget and aren't concerned about overclocking, etc. Stay tuned for many more Linux tests of the i5-6500 with some of the articles coming up being a fresh GCC vs. Clang Skylake compiler comparison, Intel P-State benchmarks on the i5-6500, some Mesa Git graphics benchmarks, and the other interesting areas as Intel's Skylake Linux support continues advancing. If you appreciated the tests done so far on the Core i5 6500, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip to allow more of these Linux hardware tests to happen.