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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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.