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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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