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
Benchmarking Performance: CPU Office Tests
The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modeling, and so on and so forth.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to compile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.
Our Chrome Compile test is a mix of load, but also loves L3 cache. We've seen before that the L3 victim cache on AMD can be a defecit here, but even then the Core i5 cannot overcome the 3:1 thread deficit to the Ryzen 5 CPUs. The Core i7-7740X hits the nail on the head for threads and single thread performance, although users that play in this space would look straight to the Core i7-7800X, and likely decide that +16.5% better performance is worth the +18.2% extra cost.
PCMark8: link
Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.
SYSmark 2014 SE: link
SYSmark is developed by Bapco, a consortium of industry CPU companies. The goal of SYSmark is to take stripped down versions of popular software, such as Photoshop and Onenote, and measure how long it takes to process certain tasks within that software. The end result is a score for each of the three segments (Office, Media, Data) as well as an overall score. Here a reference system (Core i3-6100, 4GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, Integrated HD 530 graphics) is used to provide a baseline score of 1000 in each test.
A note on context for these numbers. AMD left Bapco in the last two years, due to differences of opinion on how the benchmarking suites were chosen and AMD believed the tests are angled towards Intel processors and had optimizations to show bigger differences than what AMD felt was present. The following benchmarks are provided as data, but the conflict of opinion between the two companies on the validity of the benchmark is provided as context for the following numbers.
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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.