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
Shadow of Mordor
The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
A 2014 game is fairly old to be testing now, however SoM has a stable code and player base, and can still stress a PC down to the ones and zeroes. At the time, SoM was unique, offering a dynamic screen resolution setting allowing users to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. This form of natural oversampling was designed to let the user experience a truer vision of what the developers wanted, assuming you had the graphics hardware to power it but had a sub-4K monitor.
The title has an in-game benchmark, for which we run with an automated script implement the graphics settings, select the benchmark, and parse the frame-time output which is dumped on the drive. The graphics settings include standard options such as Graphical Quality, Lighting, Mesh, Motion Blur, Shadow Quality, Textures, Vegetation Range, Depth of Field, Transparency and Tessellation. There are standard presets as well.
We run the benchmark at 1080p and a native 4K, using our 4K monitors, at the Ultra preset. Results are averaged across four runs and we report the average frame rate, 99th percentile frame rate, and 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
Shadow of Mordor Conclusions
Again, a win across the board for Intel, with the Core i7 taking the top spot in pretty much every scenario. AMD isn't that far behind for the most part.
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Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
*As specifically written down on that page and mentioned in the explanation for that benchmark*, GeoThermal Valley at 1080p on the GTX 1080 seems incredibly optimized: all the Core i5 chips do so much better than all the other chips.lixindiyi - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
The frequency of Ryzen 7 1700 should be 3.0/3.7 GHz.Integr8d - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
"After several years of iterative updates, slowly increasing core counts and increasing IPC, we have gotten used to being at least one generation of microarchitecture behind the mainstream consumer processor families. There are many reasons for this, including enterprise requirements for long support platforms as well as enterprise update cycles."You forgot 'milking their consumer, enthusiast and enterprise markets'...
Arbie - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Ian! You're a Brit - please help defend our common language. You meant to say "raises the question". "Begs the question" is totally different and does not even approximate what you intended.Journos: You don't have to understand "begs the question" because you'll very rarely need it. If you mean "raises the question" then just use that - plain English.
Mayank Singh - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Can someone explain how could the i5's could have got better performance than the i7 at 1080p?Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Geothermal Valley on RoTR seems to be optimized for 1080p on a GTX 1080 and overly so, giving a lot more performance on that specific setup and test.Icehawk - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
How is that possible? The i5 has slower clocks and less cache. So how can it be faster, "optimization" isn't valid here IMO unless I am missing something.I think you have a throttling issue or something else that needs to be examined. Monitoring long term clocks and temps is something that you need to look at incorporating if only to help validate results.
lucam - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
When are you guys doing the iPad Pro review?dgz - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I remember a time when AT used to be a trustworthy. Who are you fulling, Ian? No one, that's who. Shame on you.Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I've been called an AMD shill and an Intel shill in the space of two weeks. Fun, isn't it.