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.
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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.