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
Shadow of Mordor
The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
A 2014 game is fairly old to be testing now, however SoM has a stable code and player base, and can still stress a PC down to the ones and zeroes. At the time, SoM was unique, offering a dynamic screen resolution setting allowing users to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. This form of natural oversampling was designed to let the user experience a truer vision of what the developers wanted, assuming you had the graphics hardware to power it but had a sub-4K monitor.
The title has an in-game benchmark, for which we run with an automated script implement the graphics settings, select the benchmark, and parse the frame-time output which is dumped on the drive. The graphics settings include standard options such as Graphical Quality, Lighting, Mesh, Motion Blur, Shadow Quality, Textures, Vegetation Range, Depth of Field, Transparency and Tessellation. There are standard presets as well.
We run the benchmark at 1080p and a native 4K, using our 4K monitors, at the Ultra preset. Results are averaged across four runs and we report the average frame rate, 99th percentile frame rate, 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
Shadow of Mordor Conclusions
Again, a win across the board for Intel, with the Core i7 taking the top spot in pretty much every scenario. AMD isn't that far behind for the most part.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
176 Comments
View All Comments
Chaser - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Go 2600K. LMAO!YukaKun - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Hey, I'm still using my 4.6Ghz 2700K, so these numbers bring joy to me!Cheers! :P
mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
4.6? Outrageous! I would be offended if I were a 2700K at a mere 4.6! Get that thing up to 5.0 asap. 8) Mbd-dependent I suppose, but I've built seven 2700K systems so far, 5.0 every time, low noise and good temps. Marvelous chip. And oh yeah, 2GB/sec with a 950 Pro. 8)lowlymarine - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Either you're water cooling those systems, or you should consider investing in lottery tickets. My 2600k wouldn't push past 4.4 without very worrying amounts of voltage (1.4V+) and even 4.4 ran so hot I on my 212+ I settled for 4.2 to keep the core under 1.3V.soliloquist - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Yeah, Sandy Bridge is holding up nicely. Its pretty ridiculous actually.colonelclaw - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Wait, am I reading these graphs correctly? Unless I'm going mad, they seem to say that for gaming there's no need to upgrade if you already have a 2600K. Huh?If true, and I have no reason to doubt the data, that would make the 2600K one of the greatest processors ever?
Icehawk - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Yup, it's been said many times - if you have an i7 processor you really don't need to upgrade it for gaming, spend the money on a new GPU every few years. I have a 3700k & GF970, other than the video card the system is 6yrs old - I used to build a new one every other year. I've been considering the 7800\7820 though as I do a lot of encoding.Gothmoth - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
"...Intel’s official line is about giving customers options. ..."yeah like.. if you want more PCI lanes to use all oyu mainboard features just buy the 999$ CPU..... LOL.
mapesdhs - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Indeed, just like the "option" of a CPU like the 4820K (4-core but with 40 lanes) suddenly vanished after X79. :D Intel's current lineup is an insult.Kalelovil - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Some mistakes for the Ryzen entries in the comparisons on page 1.PCI-E (Ryzen die has 20 lanes non-chipset, not 16), clockspeeds (too high), TDP (1700 is 65W).
Also, I see your point of comparing non-sale prices, but the 1700X seems to be widely and consistently available at near the i7-7740x MSRP. It's all but an official price cut.