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
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run a fixed v2.11 version of the game due to some peculiarities of the splash screen added after the merger with the standalone Escalation expansion, and have an automated tool to call the benchmark on the command line. (Prior to v2.11, the benchmark also supported 8K/16K testing, however v2.11 has odd behavior which nukes this.)
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at Extreme settings, and take the frame-time output for our average, percentile, and 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
Ashes Conclusion
Pretty much across the board, no matter the GPU or the resolution, Intel gets the win here. This is most noticable in the time under analysis, although AMD seems to do better when the faster cards are running at the lower resolution. That's nothing to brag about though.
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Alistair - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I look at it this way: in 2016 I bought a 6600k for $350 CAD. In 2017 I bought a Ryzen 1700 for $350 CAD. Overall speed increase 240%. So AMD delivered 240 percent more performance at the same price in one year. Intel continues to deliver less than 10 percent per dollar. I could care less if the single performance is the same.Call me next time Intel releases a chip a year later that is 240 percent faster for the same price.
Hurr Durr - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
So you bought yourself inferior IPC and a sad attempt at ameliorating it by piling up cores, and now have to cope with this through wishful thinking of never materializing performance percents. Classic AMD victim behavior.Alistair - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
First of all, stop using IPC, an expression you don't understand. Use single core performance. In almost every single benchmark I see dramatic speed improvements. I'm comparing the i5 with a Ryzen 1700 as they were the same cost. People harping over the i7-7700k apparantly didn't notice the 1700 selling for as low as $279 USD.Also get higher fps in almost every single game (Mass Effect Andromeda, Civilization and Overwatch in particular).
Alistair - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
I have tremendous respect for Ian, whose knowledge and integrity is of the highest order. I just think some of his words in this review lose the plot. As he said, "it would appear Intel has an uphill struggle to convince users that Kaby Lake-X is worth the investment". He should have emphasized that a little more.In Canada, Ryzen 1700 plus motherboard = $450. i5 (not i7) plus motherboard is $600. Yes, $150 dollars more!
Intel has 20 percent faster single core performance and yet Ryzen is 2.4 times (+140 percent) faster overall... Numbers should speak for themselves if you don't lose the plot. I agree single threaded performance is very important when the divergence is large, such as Apple's A10 vs Snapdragon 835, or the old Bulldozer. But the single threaded gap has mostly closed and a yawning gulf has opened up in total price/performance. Story of the year!
Hurr Durr - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Extolling price slashing right after launch, boy you`re on a roll today.silverblue - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
I think you should prove why you think Intel is the superior buy, instead of just trolling and not actually providing any rationale behind your "arguments".On Amazon.co.uk right now, there are four Ryzen and one FX CPU in the top 10. Here's the list (some of the recommended retail price values are missing or a bit - in the case of the 8350 - misleading):
1) i7-7700K £308.00; RRP £415.99
2) R5 1600 £189.19; RRP £219.95
3) R7 1700 £272.89; RRP £315.95
4) i5-7600K £219.99; RRP £?
5) i5-7500 £173.00; RRP £?
6) FX-8350 £105.50; RRP £128.09
7) i5-6500 £175.09; RRP £?
8) R5 1500X £165.99; RRP £189.98
9) Pentium G4400 £48.90; RRP £?
10) R5 1600X £215.79; RRP £249.99
There must be a ton of stupid people buying CPUs now then, or perhaps they just prefer solder as their thermal interface material of choice.
Advantages for Intel right now: clock speed; overclocking headroom past 4 GHz; iGPU (not -X CPUs)
Disadvantages for Intel right now: price; limited availability of G4560; feature segmentation (well, that's always been a factor); overall platform cost
An AMD CPU would probably consume similar amounts of power if they could be pushed past 4.1GHz so I won't list that as a disadvantage for Intel, nor will I list Intel's generally inferior box coolers as not every AMD part comes with one to begin with.
The performance gap in single threaded workloads at the same clock speed has shrunk from 60%+ to about 10%, power consumption has tumbled, and it also looks like AMD scales better as more cores are added. Unless you're just playing old or unoptimised games, or work in a corporate environment where money is no object, I don't see how AMD wouldn't be a viable alternative. That's just me, though - I'm really looking forward to your reasons.
Gothmoth - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
no first of = stop arguing with stupid trolls...prisonerX - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I can double my IPC by having another core. Are you really that dumb?Hurr Durr - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
AMD victim calling anyone dumb is peak ironing. You guys are out in force today, does it really hurt so bad?wira123 - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
yeah intel victim is in full force as well today, which is indeed ironic