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
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run a fixed v2.11 version of the game due to some peculiarities of the splash screen added after the merger with the standalone Escalation expansion, and have an automated tool to call the benchmark on the command line. (Prior to v2.11, the benchmark also supported 8K/16K testing, however v2.11 has odd behavior which nukes this.)
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at Extreme settings, and take the frame-time output for our average, percentile, 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
Ashes Conclusion
Pretty much across the board, no matter the GPU or the resolution, Intel gets the win here. This is most noticable in the time under analysis, although AMD seems to do better when the faster cards are running at the lower resolution. That's nothing to brag about though.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
176 Comments
View All Comments
mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
2700K, +1.5GHz every time.shabby - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
So much for upgrading from a kbl-x to skl-x when the motherboard could fry the cpu, nice going intel.Nashiii - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Nice article Ian. What I will say is I am a little confused around this comment:"Intel wins for the IO and chipset, offering 24 PCIe 3.0 lanes for USB 3.1/SATA/Ethernet/storage, while AMD is limited on that front, having 8 PCIe 2.0 from the chipset."
You forgot to mention the AMD total PCI-E IO. It has 24 PCI-E 3.0 lanes with 4xPCI-e 3.0 going to the chipset which can be set to 8x PCI-E 2.0 if 5Gbps is enough per lane, i.e in the case of USB3.0.
I have read that Kabylake-X only has 16 PCI-E 3.0 lanes native. Not sure about PCH support though...
KAlmquist - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
With Kabylake-X, the only I/O that doesn't go through the chipset is the 16 PCI-E 3.0 lanes you mention. With Ryzen, in addition to what is provided by the chipset, the CPU provides1) Four USB 3.1 connections
2) Two SATA connections
3) 18 PCI-E 3.0 lanes, or 20 lanes if you don't use the SATA connections
So if you just look at the CPU, Ryzen has more connectivity than Kabylake-X, but the X299 chip set used with Kabylake-X is much more capable (and expensive) than anything in the AMD lineup. Also, the X299 doesn't provide any USB 3.1 ports (or more precisely, 10 gb per second speed ports), so those are typically provided by a separate chip, adding to the cost of X299 motherboards.
Allan_Hundeboll - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Interesting review with great benchmarks. (I don't understand why so many reviews only report average frames pr. second)The ryzen r5 1600 seems to offer great value for money, but i'm a bit puzzled why the slowest clocked R5 beats the higher clocked R7 in a lot of the 99% benchmarks, Im guessing its because the latency delta when moving data from one core to another penalize the higher core count R7 more?
BenSkywalker - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
The gaming benchmarks are, uhm..... pretty useless.Third tier graphics cards as a starting point, why bother?
Seems like an awful lot of wasted time. As a note you may want to consider- when testing a new graphics card you get the fastest CPU you can so we can see what the card is capable of, when testing a new CPU you get the fastest GPU you can so we can see what the CPU is capable of. The way the benches are constructed, pretty useless for those of us that want to know gaming performance.
Tetsuo1221 - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Benchmarking at 1080p... enough said.. Completely and utterly redundantQasar - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
why is benchmarking @ 1080p Completely and utterly redundant ?????meacupla - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
I don't know that guy's particulars, but, to me, using X299 to game at 1080p seems like a waste.If I was going to throw down that kind of money, I would want to game at 1440p or 4K
silverblue - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Yes, but 1080p shifts the bottleneck towards the CPU.