This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this folio. Terms of utilise.

KabyLakeDie

Today, Intel is taking the lid off its 7th Generation Core microprocessor family, codenamed Kaby Lake. It's been roughly five years since Intel last delivered a meaning performance leap in a single generation and the Core i7-7700K has a number of challenges riding on its shoulders. This is the commencement new large-cadre processor since Intel switched from Tick-Tock, which alternated new process nodes with new architectures, to a three-step Process-Architecture-Optimization strategy. This is the 2nd iteration of the Skylake core, but it's implemented on an avant-garde 14nm node, as Intel disclosed earlier this year. It's also the kickoff Intel processor to support new Optane SSDs, provided the appropriate chipset is used (more than on that later on).

The Core i7-7700K also has the stardom of existence the last chip generation Intel will launch before AMD'due south own Ryzen (née Zen) architecture debuts later this quarter, and you tin bet AMD will be watching these results very closely when it comes to calibrating the speeds and feeds of their own CPU core. Put it all together, and this CPU launch is going to matter more than than most. Let'south take a expect at what we've got to talk near — first the platform, followed past the CPU and its performance.

The Z270 chipset

The Core i7-7700K and Core i7-6700K are both backwards and forrad-compatible, meaning you tin can drop a 6th-generation core into a new Z270 motherboard or pair a 7th-generation chip with the older Z170. Nosotros've covered the major differences below.

Z270-Diagram

DRAM frequency: While we've had no problem using DDR4-3200 for our tests today, Z170'south official support tops out at 2133MHz, compared with 2400MHz for Z270.

Additional PCIe southbridge lanes: The Z170 supports 20 PCIe three.0 lanes off the southbridge, Z270 offers 24.

Intel Smart Connect: Intel Smart Connect periodically wakes your PC to download e-mail or receive periodic push updates. This engineering used to be offered on certain Intel desktop chipsets, but was removed after the Z87 debuted. The Z270 adds it as an optional characteristic.

At that place are a few new capabilities that require both a Z270 motherboard and a 7th generation CPU.

4K content streaming: 4K streaming is limited to Z270 boards and Kaby Lake CPUs, either because Intel but implemented full support for Microsoft's PlayReady 3.0 in its latest chips, or considering but the seventh generation family supports hardware accelerated decode for x-flake HEVC. 4K playback also requires at to the lowest degree the Anniversary Update of Windows ten and is currently simply available via Microsoft Edge.

Intel Optane retentiveness support: According to Intel, Optane will be bachelor both as main retention and equally the storage medium of choice for SSDs. The visitor has not clarified what interface its SSD drives will use, or if it intends to offer SATA, PCI-Limited cards, or M.2-compatible chips. Optane memory (which means DIMMs) will only be available for Z270 chipsets, while Optane SSDs should be compatible with other platforms that support whatever standard Intel decides to ship.

1 notable missing feature? USB 3.1 Gen 2 back up. Gen 2 offers transfer speeds of upwards to 10Gb/south, but Intel hasn't built a native controller capable of operating at these clock speeds. Some vendors may include back up for this option, either past integrating third-party controllers or by using Intel's Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3 solution, which likewise offers USB iii.one Gen two support.

The 7th-Gen Core i7 family

Intel is launching a number of Cadre i3, i5, and i7 desktop CPUs today, just the cores themselves are merely modestly unlike than what we saw with Skylake back in 2015. As we've previously discussed, Kaby Lake is built on a new second-generation 14nm procedure node with a predicted 12% operation increase. H.265 Main10 and VP9 eight-scrap and ten-bit are now fully supported in hardware (encode and decode) which will significantly reduce power consumption when playing content encoded in these formats. The scrap will also permit for improved transition into and out-of clock states (Intel calls this Speed Shift Technology, equally shown below).

Intel-Kaby-Lake3

The Core i7-7700K we'll be reviewing today has a base of operations clock of four.2GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.5GHz (our fleck topped out at four.4GHz under full load). That compares well against the Core i7-6700K (4GHz base, 4.2GHz Turbo), particularly since our 6700K refused to budge in a higher place 4GHz under load, despite plenty of thermal and power headroom.

On paper, the Core i7-7700K is only v% and seven% faster than the 6700K in terms of base clock and turbo clock, but the practical results nosotros saw showed a larger clock gap in practise. Intel's other 7th generation SKUs show slightly larger gaps — the Core i5-7600K (3.8GHz base, 4.2GHz Turbo) has a ix% higher base of operations clock and an viii% higher boost clock than the Core i5-6600K (three.5GHz base, 3.9GHz Turbo). This trend holds true fifty-fifty at lower TDPs, the Core i5-7400T has a 35W TDP, a base clock of 2.4GHz, and a max boost clock of 3GHz. The 6400T, in dissimilarity, has a ii.2GHz base clock and a 2.8GHz heave clock.

Special mention: Intel's new, unlocked Core i3

A few years ago, Intel launched a 20th Anniversary Pentium (G3258). The diminutive dual-core was positioned like a budget part, at $72, simply could hit overclocks of four.7 – 4.8GHz fairly easily. While that didn't brand the core a unilateral winner in every case, it was an intriguing pick for overclockers on a upkeep. Now, Intel is planning to offer an unlocked Cadre i3 processor, its first always. The Cadre i3-7350K will have two cores, four threads, a flat 4.2GHz clock speed, and an unlocked multiplier. Toll is set at $162 in yard-unit quantities.

This compares well against the Cadre i3-6320, the electric current top-finish Intel Core i3 from the Skylake generation. That cadre tops out at 3.9GHz and has a list price of $149 – $157. While the Core i3-7350K is considerably more expensive than the Pentium G3258, it'south also significantly more capable thank you to college base clock speeds and Hyper-Threading support. While dual core processors without Hyper-Threading have been pushed to the bargain bin, the Core i3's bones configuration is mirrored in most of Intel's mobile product lineup. With laptops outselling desktops significantly these days, dual-core CPUs aren't going anywhere anytime shortly. If Intel's Core i3-7350K can hit the same four.8GHz clock speeds as the Pentium G3258 it could cement itself every bit an enthusiast darling.

Our exam board: The Asus Strix Z270E Gaming

Every adept CPU needs a practiced motherboard and Asus was kind enough to offer their Strix Z270E Gaming platform for our tests today. This new platform fully supports the BCLCK overclocking that Kaby Lake implements and tin can run DDR4 retention at up to 3866MHz. Both AMD and Nvidia multi-GPU configurations are supported via the PCI-Express slots (the board technically supports up to three video cards, just the third PCIe slot is only electrically x4. Up to 64GB of memory is supported, though gamers who want to button DRAM speed and chapters may, as ever, have to make some trade-offs between the two to ensure system stability. Nosotros recommend consulting Asus' retentiveness recommendations earlier pulling the trigger.

Asus-1

Of the dual M.2 ports supported by the board, both of them tin be configured equally either PCIe 3.0 x4 devices or every bit SATA way devices. If yous opt for SATA style, it means sharing port bandwidth with several of the other SATA ports on the motherboard. USB iii.1 Gen 2 back up is provided by Asmedia. The board supports the utilize of USB 3.1 Gen 2 for both front end and rear USB 3.1 connections, pregnant you've got ane front end-mounted port, i rear Blazon-A, 1 rear Type-C, and an additional six USB iii.0 ports provided by the native Intel controller.

Wireless and Bluetooth 4.one back up are provided on-board, with back up for 802.11ac and both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. The Z270E's SupremeFX audio solution is via the ALC S1220A codec. The integrated LEDs do nothing to improve functioning, but they practise light upwards the board nicely (additional board details and photos are available in the slideshow below).

We didn't have fourth dimension to put the Z270E Strix Gaming through its paces equally thoroughly as we would've liked, with this launch coming hard on the end of the vacation season. I'd exist remiss not to annotation that our overall experience with the board has been excellent. Early on boards with tight launch schedules can exist a crapshoot, only the Asus Z270E Strix Gaming is solid, with a well-organized UEFI, a variety of options for overclockers and neophytes alike, and support for automatic overclocking that nosotros plan to revisit at a later date. With a street toll gear up at $199 it'southward not the cheapest 200-series motherboard on the market place, but there's a lot of value here.

Now that nosotros've stepped through the motherboard, CPU, and chipset, let's take a look at overall performance.

Exam Setup

It'south been a little while since ET published a full CPU review, which meant it was fourth dimension to throw out old, legacy results and offset from scratch. We're still working on building out a new test suite and gathering results in training for AMD's Ryzen launch later on this quarter, so this specific review is limited to three CPUs in total: The Core i7-7700K, the Cadre i7-6700K (both tested in the Asus Strix Z270E Gaming motherboard) every bit well as Intel's 10-core Cadre i7-6950X and its accompanying Gigabyte GA-X99-Ultra Gaming motherboard.

All of our CPUs were configured with four 8GB sticks of DDR4-3200 courtesy of GSkill (F4-3200C14Q-32GTZ). We had no trouble running the RAM at 3200MHz with Skylake, Kaby Lake, or Broadwell-EP, fifty-fifty though the maximum clock speed was substantially college than annihilation these chips are formally rated for. All of our CPUs were tested using Windows ten patched upwardly to the latest version, with a 750W Antec 80 Plus Golden power supply, a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and a Gigabyte GTX 1070 8GB running Nvidia'south 376.33 drivers.

The 6950X wouldn't accept been my first choice for a direct comparing to the 6700K and 7700K, but it does requite us the opportunity to contrast the performance of Intel'due south standard quad-core + HyperThreading CPUs against a 10-core behemoth running at a lower clock charge per unit (3GHz base, 3.5GHz maximum all-core Turbo). With a 1KU price of over $1700, the 6950X isn't inexpensive, and so it's worth checking where those cores deliver and where they fall short confronting more conventional CPUs.

Note: While nosotros intended to benchmark both Civilisation VI and Ashes of the Singularity, Civilization VI will only store 1 file of criterion results for each of its two benchmarks, despite going to the problem of generating custom names for every benchmark run and informing the end-user that these result files take been saved to deejay. This is presumably an accident, since it makes no sense to go to the problem of creating custom-named log files merely to dump the files thereafter, but since we didn't observe this errata until we went to compare the results, we did non have fourth dimension to retest that game.

Our benchmark results are given beneath. All three of our Blender Render benchmarks can be downloaded here. Each graph within the slideshow can be clicked to open it in a new window.

Ability Consumption

Our power consumption results need a bit of caption. When nosotros configured the Core i7-6950X for testing, we noticed dramatically different power consumption, fifty-fifty at idle, depending on whether we configured the organisation to utilise Intel's Extreme Retention Profile. Without XMP enabled, the Core i7-6950X idled at 65W and ran all-out at 168W. With XMP enabled, the fleck turned in a consistent 107W idle draw, with a 210W arrangement power draw in Prime95. This effect persisted even subsequently we manually checked and configured the CPU to make certain Gigabyte's UEFI settings weren't overriding Intel's preprogrammed Turbo frequencies. We opted to examination the 6950X with the same retentivity configuration and timings we had used for our Asus Strix Z270E Gaming motherboard, since non-using those settings proved to touch the fleck's performance in several tests and would not have been a true apples-to-apples comparison.

PowerConsumption

Correct away, we see the benefits of Intel'southward improved 14nm process. Our Core i7-6700K ran at a consistent 4GHz in all our benchmark tests, while our Core i7-7700K preferred a 4.4GHz clock. Intel is pushing a 10% college clock rate in Prime95, while power consumption for the 7700K is actually down slightly from the 6700K. Only — and this is critical — information technology's only down slightly. I'm not running temperature figures at this indicate considering of a configuration upshot with my Peltier+air cooler that lowered its overall efficiency, but the data I gathered suggests that the Core i7-7700K runs hotter than the Core i7-6700K, even if the difference isn't very big.

Leaked overclocking results suggest that Intel'south decision to utilize thermal paste instead of solder to connect the 7700K's heat spreader to the die has resulted in poor overall thermal conductivity, and it'southward not articulate how skilful of an overclocker the core will plough out to be. I suspect the reply is "not very." Intel clearly picked up some performance gains from its new 14nm process, only a careful comparing of its old sixth Gen SKUs to its 7th-gen SKUs suggest that the new chips are between 5-10% faster in the same ability envelopes. That'due south an improvement, certainly, but it'due south non a very big 1. One can't help wondering if Intel could've squeezed another iv-6% out of the chip only by opting for solder.

Conclusions

As much as I'd similar to write something exciting near the Core i7-7700K, everything I can think of qualifies equally damning with faint praise. It'south a solid CPU core with some modest clock speed improvements, a few new media engine capabilities, and a slightly improved ability consumption curve. If you're really wanting to build a 4K-capable HTPC with the ability to stream 4K content via Netflix, 7th Generation Core fries are definitely the manner to get, and we're downright curious about the upcoming Core i3-7350K.

Only the hard truth is, Intel's "Optimization" step doesn't seem to have delivered all that much in the way of concrete benefits. Best-case, Kaby Lake is about ten% faster than Skylake in a modestly improved power envelope. Considering that Skylake launched 18 months ago at present, that's not much improvement to deliver given how much time has passed. And Intel, which has a long history of launching its less-impressive chips on weird dates and times (the original Socket 478 iteration of Prescott launched on Super Bowl Sunday, 2004) undoubtedly knows it. Launching a chip this early on in the year means that journalists who might have enjoyed spending time with family and friends had to piece of work overtime to get the review done, given that CES kicks off on January 5.

Terminal week, a rumor spread that Intel was working on a new x86 architecture. I have no inside information on whether this is true, but Intel's CPU performance improvements have been limited to minor yr-on-yr gains since Sandy Bridge launched in 2011. Much of this is due to physics being a bully deal less cooperative, and if you lot compare Intel'due south operation in the 15W – 35W space the company has delivered much larger gains. That's non much comfort to desktop die-hards who remember when yous could count on a new CPU delivering 2x the performance of your last CPU inside 24-36 months, and information technology wouldn't surprise me at this point if Intel was working on a new clean-sheet design.

The Z270 chipset is solid, the Asus Strix Z270E Gaming is a bully motherboard, GSkill's DDR4-3200 worked flawlessly with every motherboard we tested, Optane may evangelize some game-changing performance in the futurity, and if y'all need a new CPU after holding off on upgrading for several years, at that place'due south no reason not to upgrade to the Core i7-7700K. That is, of form, unless you'd like to see what AMD is going to deliver with Ryzen this quarter. Given the cost of buying new RAM, new motherboards, and a new CPU, at that place's a proficient argument to exist made for waiting and seeing a trivial longer.

Now read: What is Moore's Law?