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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Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
In the way everyone has historically been reporting PCIe lanes, Ryzen only has 16 PCIe lanes intended for graphics, with the other four for the chipset and another four for storage as an SoC. We've repeated this over and over and over again. Same with Threadripper: 60, plus four for chipset. If we're going to start counting PCIe lanes for chipsets (and DMI equivalents) and SoC related PCIe lanes for storage and others, we'll have to go and rewrite the PCIe lane counts for the last several generations of Intel and AMD CPUs.Kalelovil - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
If the category is PCIe lanes for graphics that is quite right.But by that token doesn't (non cut-down) Broadwell-E/Skylake-E only have 32 lanes intended for graphics, as the switching logic allows for 2x16 and 4x8 configurations.
Although this is getting quite in-the-weeds. Overall I really appreciate the time and effort put into PC component reviews by the Anandtech staff.
FreckledTrout - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
I agree with Ian as 4 PCIe lanes are always taken since you are running Ryzen with a chipset with no real way around that. I also would agree with say Skylake-x reporting 4 less PCIe lanes for the DMI link.Trenteth - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
except Ryzen has 16x GPU lanes, $x to the chipset and 4x diect to an NVMe or U.2 drive. it's 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes off the CPU usable.Notmyusualid - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
I got 40 lanes on my E5-2690.I'm running 4x 1070s on that, and PCIe based storage, and I doubled my throughput by moving the SSD to a riser card (until the 4th GPU went in), which means its back on the m/b.
Though, you can't notice in everyday use. Oddly.
Trenteth - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
Having the 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes for a NVMe drive is an advantage, it's connected directly to the CPU and bypasses the chipset link which allows more bandwidth for USB/PCIe 2.0 lanes and SATA. I don't agree with you on not counting them.Kalelovil - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Your charts seem to label the i7 7740X with a $329 MSRP.In contrast your first page (and Intel ARK) lists a $339-$350 MSRP.
I assume the former is a mistake?
Ian Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
$339 is the 1k tray price - the one that Intel quotes in the price lists and applicable if you buy 1000 OEM CPUs. $350 is MSRP that retailers will apply from their stock from distributors. Add more if you want a cooler. The issue here is that sometimes Intel never quotes an MSRP for some OEM-only processors, and AMD never seem to quote tray/OEM prices for retail parts. I'll edit this and make it clearer.Kalelovil - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Oh, by former I was referring to the $329 in your charts not the $339 on ARKIan Cutress - Monday, July 24, 2017 - link
Oops, I misread the price and misread your comment. Graphs should be updated with a cache refresh.