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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Gothmoth - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
so why not test at 640x480... shifts the bottleneck even more to the cpu... you are kidding yourself.silverblue - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Not really. If the GPU becomes the bottleneck at or around 1440p, and as such the CPU is the limiting factor below that, why go so far down when practically nobody games below 1080p anymore?Zaxx420 - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
"Over the last few generations, Intel has increased IPC by 3-10% each generation, making a 30-45% increase since 2010 and Sandy Bridge..."I have an old Sandy i5 2500K on an Asus Z68 that can do 5GHz all day on water and 4.8 on air. I know it's ancient IP...but I wonder if it could hold it's own vs a stock clocked Skylake i5? hmmmm...
hbsource - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Great review. Thanks.I think I've picked the best nit yet: On the Civ 6 page, you inferred that Leonard Nimoy did the voiceover on Civ 5 when he actually did it on Civ 4.
gammaray - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
it's kind of ridiculous to see the Sandy bridge chip beating new cpus at 4k gaming...Zaxx420 - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Kinda makes me grin...I have an old Sandy i5 2500K on an Asus Z68 that can do 5GHz all day on water and 4.8 on air. I know it's ancient IP...but I wonder if it could hold it's own vs a stock clocked Skylake i5? hmmmm...
Mugur - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Much ado about nothing. So the best case for 7740 is Office applications or opening PDF files? The author seems to have lost the sight of the forest because of the trees.Some benchmarks are odd, some are useless in the context. I watched the YouTube version of this: https://www.techspot.com/review/1442-intel-kaby-la... and it looked like a more realistic approach for a 7740k review.
Gothmoth - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
well i guess intel is putting more advertising money on anandtech.otherwise i cant´t explain how an overpriced product with heat problems and artificial crippled pci lanes on an enthusiast platform(!) can get so much praise without much criticism.
jabber - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
I miss the days when you saw a new bunch of CPUs come out and the reviews showed that there was a really good case for upgrading if you could afford to. You know a CPU upgrade once or twice a year. Now I upgrade (maybe) once every 6-7 years. Sure it's better but not so much fun.Dragonstongue - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
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.Funny that is, seeing as AM4 has 16 pci-e lanes available to it unless when go down the totem pole those lanes get segregated differently , even going from the above table Intel is offering 16 for x299not 24 as you put directly into words, so who wins in IO, no one, they both offer 16 lanes. Now if you are comparing via price, x299 is obviously a premium product, at least compare to current AM4 premium end which is x370 chipset, pretty even footing on the motherboards when compared similar "specs" comparing the best AMD will offer in the form of x399, it makes the best "specs" of x299 laughable.
AMD seems to NOT be shortchanging pci-e lanes, DRAM ability (or speed) functional, proper thermal interface used etc etc.
Your $ by all means, but seriously folks need to take blinders off, how much raw power is this "95w TDP" processors using when ramped to 5+Ghz, sure in theory it will be the fastest for per core performance, but how long will the cpu last running at that level, how much extra power will be consumed, what price of an acceptable cooler is needed to maintain it within thermal spec and so forth.
Interesting read, but much seems out of context to me. May not like it, but AMD has given a far better selection of product range this year for cpu/motherboard chipsets, more core, more threads, lots of IO connectivity options, fair pricing overall (the $ value in Canada greed of merchants does not count as a fault against AMD)
Am done.