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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Gulagula - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
Can anyone explain to me how the 7600k and in some cases the 7600 beating the 7700k almost consistenly. I don't doubt the Ryzen results but the Intel side of results confuses the heck out of me.Ian Cutress - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
Sustained turbo, temperatures, quality of chips from binning (a good 7600 chip will turbo much longer than a 7600K will), time of day (air temperature is sometimes a pain - air conditioning doesn't really exist in the UK, especially in an old flat in London), speed shift response, uncore response, data locality (how often does the system stall, how long does it take to get the data), how clever the prefetchers are, how a motherboard BIOS ramps up and down the turbos or how accurate its thermal sensors are (I try and keep the boards constant for a full generation because of this). If it's only small margin between the data, there's not much to discuss.Funyim - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Are you absolutely sure your 7700k isn't broken? It sure looks like it is. I understand your point about margins but numbers are numbers and yours look wrong. No other benchmarks I've seen to date aligns with your findings. And please for the love of god ammend this article if it is.Hurr Durr - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
One wonders why would you relegate yourself to subpar performance of AMD processors.Alistair - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Your constant refrain belonged in the bulldozer era (when the single threaded performance difference was on the order of 80-100 percent). Apparently you can't move past the Ryzen launch. If a different company such as Samsung had launched these CPUs the reception would have been very different. I've never bought AMD before but my Ryzen 1700 is incredible for its price, and I had to be disillusioned by my terrible Skylake upgrade first before I was willing to purchase from AMD.Gothmoth - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
don´t argue with trolls....StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Why would Intel enable HT when they could sell it as DLC?https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to...
coolhardware - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Glad to hear that the benchmarking is (becoming) less of a chore :-) Kudos and thank you for the great article!fallaha56 - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Surely that AVX drop -10 when overclocking was too much?What about delidding?
Samus - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
It still stands that the best value in this group is the Ryzen 1600X, mostly because it's platform cost is 1/3rd that of Intel's HEDT. So unless you need those platform advantages (PCIe, which even x299 doesn't completely have on these KBL-X CPU's) it really won't justify spending $300 more on a system, even if single threaded performance is 15-20% better.Just the fact an AMD system of less than half the cost can ice a high end Intel system in WinRAR speaks a lot to AMD's credibility here.