The Intel Kaby Lake-X i7 7740X and i5 7640X Review: The New Single-Threaded Champion, OC to 5GHz
by Ian Cutress on July 24, 2017 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Kaby Lake
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Kaby Lake-X
- i7-7740X
- i5-7640X
Grand Theft Auto
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
To that end, we run the benchmark at 1920x1080 using an average of Very High on the settings, and also at 4K using High on most of them. We take the average results of four runs, reporting frame rate averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
For all our results, we show the average frame rate at 1080p first. Mouse over the other graphs underneath to see 99th percentile frame rates and 'Time Under' graphs, as well as results for other resolutions. All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire R9 Fury 4GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire RX 480 8GB Performance
1080p
4K
Grand Theft Auto Conclusions
Looking through the data, there seems to be a difference when looking at the results with an AMD GPU and an NVIDIA GPU. With the GTX 1080, there's a mix of AMD and Intel results there, but Intel takes a beating in the Time Under analysis at 1080p. The GTX 1060 is a mix at 1080p, but Intel takes the lead at 4K. When an AMD GPU is paired to the processor, all flags fly Intel.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
176 Comments
View All Comments
djayjp - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Ian, why didn't you check if the OC was being thermally throttled? Easy enough to check this. And easy enough to see if it's the temperature of the cores or not. Surprising you wouldn't include temperature or power consumption data with the OC (though I understand this hasn't typically been a focus of AT). Another site demonstrated throttling at ~95+ C.mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Is that the same site which showed that the TIM Intel is using is just not allowing the heat to get from the die to the cap? Die temp shoots up, cap temp doesn't, even with a chiller cooler.melgross - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
This article gives a good reason why huge numbers of core are a waste of money for most users.http://www.computerworld.com/article/3209724/compu...
Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Yeah, don't bother starting the article unless you're willing to create yet another useless online identity. Shame, since it seemed moderately interesting, but...alpha754293 - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
re: overclockingThat works well for the occasional heavy workload, but if you are going to be constantly running at peak load (like I did for engineering analysis), overclocking of any kind, from my experience, isn't worth the dead core or entire CPU.
I've already fried a core on the 3930K once before taking it up from 3.2 GHz stock, 3.5 GHz max TurboBoost to 4.5 GHz.
mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Alas this stuff does vary according to the invidual CPU, mbd, RAM, etc. What cooling did you use? Could also be the vcore was too high - a lot of SB-E users employed a high vcore, not realising that using a lower PLL would often make such a high vcore unnecessary. It's even more complicated if one fills all 8 RAM slots on a typical X79 mbd.alpha754293 - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
The cooling that I was using was Corsair H80i v2.The temps were fine and were consistently fine.
RAM was 8x 8 GB Cruical Ballistix Sport I think DDR3-1600? Something like that. Nothing special, but nothing super crappy either. I actually had the entire set of RAM (all eight DIMMs RMA'd once) so I know that I got a whole new set back when that happened about oh...maybe a-year-and-a-half ago now? Something like that.
Motherboard was Asus X79 Sabertooth.
Yeah, I had all 8 DIMM slots populated because it was a cheaper option compared to 4x 16 GB. Besides, using all 8 DIMMs also was able to make use of the quad-channel memory whereas going with 4x 16 GB - you can't/won't (since the memory needed to be installed in paired DIMM slots).
That CPU is now "castrated" down to 4 cores (out of 6) because 1 of the cores died (e.g. will consistently throw BSODs, but if I disable it, no problems). Makes for a decent job scheduler (or at least that's the proposed task/life for it).
Dr. Swag - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Hey Ian, on the first page you listed the turbo of the 7700k as 4.4, whereas it's actually 4.5Yuriman - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Shouldn't the 7700K read "4.2-4.5ghz" rather than 4.2-4.4?Dug - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
On RoTR-1-Valley 1080p it shows i5 7600k at 141fps and the i7 7700k at 103fps. Have a feeling these might be transposed.