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
Civilization 6
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
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
8K
16K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire R9 Fury 4GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire RX 480 8GB Performance
1080p
4K
Civilization 6 Conclusion
In all our testing scenarios, AMD wins at 1080p with minor margins on the frame rates but considerable gains in the time under analysis. Intel pushes ahead in almost all of the 4K results, except with the time under analysis at 4K using an R9 Fury, perhaps indicating that AMD is offering a steadier range in its frame rate, despite the average being lower.
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mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Let the memes collide, focus the memetic radiation, aim it at IBM and get them to jump into the x86 battle. :Ddgz - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Man, I could really use an edit button. my brain has shit itselfmapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Have you ever posted a correction because of a typo, then realised there was a typo in the correction? At that point my head explodes. :DGlock24 - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
"The second is for professionals that know that their code cannot take advantage of hyperthreading and are happy with the performance. Perhaps in light of a hyperthreading bug (which is severely limited to minor niche edge cases), Intel felt a non-HT version was required."This does not make any sense. All motherboards I've used since Hyper Threading exists (yes, all the way back to the P4) lets you disable HT. There is really no reason for the X299 i5 to exist.
Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Even if the i5 was $90-$100 cheaper? Why offer i5s at all?yeeeeman - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
First interesting point to extract from this review is that i7 2600K is still good enough for most gaming tasks. Another point that we can extract is that games are not optimized for more than 4 core so all AMD offerings are yet to show what they are capable of, since all of them have more than 4 cores / 8 threads.I think single threading argument absolute performance argument is plain air, because the differences in single thread performance between all top CPUs that you can currently buy is slim, very slim. Kaby Lake CPUs are best in this just because they are sold with high clocks out of the box, but this doesn't mean that if AMD tweaks its CPUs and pushes them to 5Ghz it won't get back the crown. Also, in a very short time there will be another uArch and another CPU that will have again better single threaded performance so it is a race without end and without reason.
What is more relevant is the multi-core race, which sooner or later will end up being used more and more by games and software in general. And when games will move to over 4 core usage then all these 4 cores / 8 threads overpriced "monsters" will become useless. That is why I am saying that AMD has some real gems on their hands with the Ryzen family. I bet you that the R7 1700 will be a much better/competent CPU in 3 years time compared to 7700K or whatever you are reviewing here. Dirt cheap, push it to 4Ghz and forget about it.
Icehawk - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
They have been saying for years that we will use more cores. Here we are almost 20 years down the road and there are few non professional apps and almost no games that use more than 4 cores and the vast majority use just two. Yes, more cores help with running multiple apps & instances but if we are just looking at the performance of the focused app less cores and more MHz is still the winner. From all I have read the two issues are that not everything is parallelizable and that coding for more cores/threads is more difficult and neither of those are going away.mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Thing is, until now there hasn't been a mainstream-affordable solution. It's true that parallel coding requires greater skill, but that being the case then the edu system should be teaching those skills. Instead the time is wasted on gender studies nonsense. Intel could have kick started this whole thing years ago by releasing the 3930K for what it actually was, an 8-core CPU (it has 2 cores disabled), but they didn't have to because back then AMD couldn't even compete with mid-range SB 2500K (hence why they never bothered with a 6-core for mainstream chipsets). One could argue the lack of market sw evolvement to exploit more cores is Intel's fault, they could have helped promote it a long time ago.cocochanel - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
+1!!!twtech - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
What can these chips do with a nice watercooling setup, and a goal of 24x7 stability? Maybe 4.7? 4.8?These seem like pretty moderate OCs overall, but I guess we were a bit spoiled by Sandy Bridge, etc., where a 1GHz overclock wasn't out of the question.