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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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.