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
Rocket League
Hilariously simple pick-up-and-play games are great fun. I'm a massive fan of the Katamari franchise for that reason — passing start on a controller and rolling around, picking up things to get bigger, is extremely simple. Until we get a PC version of Katamari that I can benchmark, we'll focus on Rocket League.
Rocket League combines the elements of pick-up-and-play, allowing users to jump into a game with other people (or bots) to play football with cars with zero rules. The title is built on Unreal Engine 3, which is somewhat old at this point, but it allows users to run the game on super-low-end systems while still taxing the big ones. Since the release in 2015, it has sold over 5 million copies and seems to be a fixture at LANs and game shows. Users who train get very serious, playing in teams and leagues with very few settings to configure, and everyone is on the same level. Rocket League is quickly becoming one of the favored titles for e-sports tournaments, especially when e-sports contests can be viewed directly from the game interface.
Based on these factors, plus the fact that it is an extremely fun title to load and play, we set out to find the best way to benchmark it. Unfortunately for the most part automatic benchmark modes for games are few and far between. Partly because of this, but also on the basis that it is built on the Unreal 3 engine, Rocket League does not have a benchmark mode. In this case, we have to develop a consistent run and record the frame rate.
Read our initial analysis on our Rocket League benchmark on low-end graphics here.
With Rocket League, there is no benchmark mode, so we have to perform a series of automated actions, similar to a racing game having a fixed number of laps. We take the following approach: Using Fraps to record the time taken to show each frame (and the overall frame rates), we use an automation tool to set up a consistent 4v4 bot match on easy, with the system applying a series of inputs throughout the run, such as switching camera angles and driving around.
It turns out that this method is nicely indicative of a real bot match, driving up walls, boosting and even putting in the odd assist, save and/or goal, as weird as that sounds for an automated set of commands. To maintain consistency, the commands we apply are not random but time-fixed, and we also keep the map the same (Aquadome, known to be a tough map for GPUs due to water/transparency) and the car customization constant. We start recording just after a match starts, and record for 4 minutes of game time (think 5 laps of a DIRT: Rally benchmark), with average frame rates, 99th percentile and frame times all provided.
The graphics settings for Rocket League come in four broad, generic settings: Low, Medium, High and High FXAA. There are advanced settings in place for shadows and details; however, for these tests, we keep to the generic settings. For both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we test at the High preset with an unlimited frame cap.
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
Rocket League Conclusions
The map we use in our testing, Aquadome, is known to be strenuous on a system, hence we see frame rates lower than what people expect for Rocket League - we're trying to cover the worst case scenario. But the results also show how AMD CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs do not seem to be playing ball with each other, which we've been told is likely related to drivers. The AMD GPUs work fine here regardless of resolution, and both AMD and Intel CPUs get in the mix.
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Santoval - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
That is not how IPC works, since it explicitly refers to single core - single thread performance. As the number of cores rises the performance of a *single* task never scales linearly because there is always some single thread code involved (Amdahl's law). For example if your task has 90% parallel and 10% serial code its performance will max out at x10 that of a single core at ~512 cores. From then on even if you had a CPU with infinite cores you couldn't extract half an ounce of additional performance. If your code was 95% parallel the performance of your task would plateau at x20. For that though you would need ~2048 cores. And so on.Of course Amdahl's law does not provide a complete picture. It assumes, for example, that your task and its code will remain fixed no matter how many cores you add on them. And it disregards the possibility of computing distinct tasks in parallel on separate cores. That's where Gustafson's Law comes in. This "law" is not concerned with speeding up the performance of tasks but computing larger and more complex tasks at the same amount of time.
An example given in Wikipedia involves boot times : Amdahl's law states that you can speed up the boot process, assuming it can be made largely parallel, up to a certain number of cores. Beyond that -when you become limited by the serial code of your bootloader- adding more cores does not help. Gustafson's law, on the contrary, states that instead of speeding up the boot process by adding more cores and computing resources, you could add colorful GUIs, increase the resolution etc, while keeping the boot time largely the same. This idea could be applied to many -but not all- computing tasks, for example ray tracing (for more photorealistic renderings) and video encoding (for smaller files or videos with better quality), and many other heavily multi-threaded tasks.
Rickyxds - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I just agree XD.Diji1 - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
"Overall speed increase 240%."LMAO. Ridiculous.
Alistair - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
No reason to laugh. I compared the 6600k vs the Ryzen 1700. 1 year speed increase of 144 percent (2.44 times the speed). Same as this: 1135 vs 466 points.http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5...
Dr. Swag - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
I disagree, best value is 1600 as it oces as well as 1600x, comes with a decent stock cooler, and is cheaper.vext - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Interesting article but it seems intended to play down the extremely bad press x299 has received which is all over the internet and Youtube.Once you get past Mr. Cuttress' glowing review, it's clear that the I5-7640x is not worth the money because of lackluster performance, the I7-7740X is marginally faster than the older 7700k, and the I7-7800x is regularly beaten by the 7740X in many benchmarks that actually count and is a monstrously inefficient energy pig. Therefore the only Intel CPUs of this batch worth buying are the 7700k/7740x, and there is no real advantage to x299. In summary, it doesn't actually change anything.
It's very telling that Mr. Cutress doesn't comment on the absolutely egregious energy consumption of the 7800x. The Test Bed setup section doesn't list the 7800x at all. The 7840x and 7740x are using a Thermalright True Copper (great choice!) but no info on the 7800x cooler. Essentially, the 7800x cameo appearance is only to challenge the extremely strong Ryzen multi-threaded results, but its negative aspects are not discussed, perhaps because it might frighten people from x299. Tsk, tsk. As my 11 year old daughter would say "No Fair." By the way, the 7800x is selling for ~ $1060 right now on Newegg, not $389.
Proudly typed on my Ryzen 1800x/Gigabyte AB350 Gaming 3. # ;-)
Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
You may not have realised but this is the Kaby Lake-X review, so it focuses on the KBL-X parts. We already have a Skylake-X review for you to mull over. There are links on the first page.mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Nevertheless, the wider picture is relevant here. The X299 platform is a mess. Intel is aiming KL-X at a market which doesn't exist, they've locked out features that actually make it useful, it's more power hungry, and a consumer needs a lot of patience and plenty of coffee to work out what the heck works and what doesn't on a mbd with a KL-X fitted.This is *exactly* the sort of criticism of Intel which should have been much stronger in the tech journalism space when Intel started pulling these sorts of stunts back with the core-crippled 3930K, heat-crazy IB and PCIe-crippled 5820K. Instead, except for a few exceptions, the tech world has been way too forgiving of Intel's treading-on-water attitude ever since SB, and now they've panicked in response to Ryzen and released a total hodgebodge of a chipset and CPU lineup which makes no sense at all. And if you get any disagreement about what I've said by anyone at Intel, just wave a 4820K in their face and say well explain this then (quad-core chip with 40 PCIe lanes, da daa!).
I've been a big fan of Z68 and X79, but nothing about Intel's current lineup appeals in the slightest.
serendip - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
There's also the funny bit about motherboards potentially killing KBL-X CPUs if a Skylake-X was used previously.What's with Intel's insane product segmentation strategy with all the crippling and inconsistent motherboard choices? It's like they want to make it hard to choose, so buyers either get the cheapest or most expensive chip.
Haawser - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
'EmergencyLake-X' is just generally embarrassing. Intel should just find a nearby landfill site and quietly bury it.