FRONTPAGE Intel Skylake-X (i9 7900X) and Kaby Lake-X (i7 7740K) CPU Review

It has been a long time coming since there was true competition in the CPU market. Intel, for the last several years and CPU generations (since 2006/Conroe-based chips and later), have been pretty dominant over their competitor, AMD. Instructions Per Clock (IPC) has always been heads above the rest. AMD's lack of comparable IPC seems to have moved them in a direction of adding more cores and threads to compete, and at a lower price. Bang for your buck was second to none from Thuban all the way to Vishera based AMD CPUs. AMD finally stepped up to the plate and, for all intents and purposes, knocked one out of the park with their Zen architecture. Not only did they manage to catch up in IPC just a few percent behind in most single threaded tasks, but they poured on the cores and kept the price low. A wonderful thing for consumers and competition.

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Nice work Joe!

Nice work Joe.

While the Boys in Blue may not be in a "panic", I wouldn't mind seeing a catastrophic loss of complacency. And they are counter punching right now. The next round is up for grabs and I give Intel credit for dropping these chips before Threadripper hits. The pricing structure is a good move, too, but I get the impression it's all sleight of hand on the 4 core chips. They took a mainstream die, removed some functionality, and fitted a more expensive platform socket without even the quad channel RAM support. (And Intel fans were wondering when they would get yet another socket from the I Team). I would think folks who are building on that platform have specific needs, and would buy the "big" chips up front. The 7740k seems to be the answer to a question nobody asked. "What I really want is a Kaby Lake with less functionality on a more expensive platform". Really? The rest of the line should provide a good counter to AMD's offerings, but the i5 and i7 chips don't seem to have a whole lot going for them. A Z270/KL platform makes way more sense if you're building with a 4c/8t or 4c/4t.

Great write up, ED! That's the kind of review that got me from the front page to the forums. So I guess that means it's partially your fault I'm hanging around. LOL

Glad we can keep you here..

This review was, for all intents and purposes, written starting friday. Intel really screwed the pooch with a lot of reviewers getting samples out. The chips didnt land in my lap until saturday afternoon... was a hell of a fathers day weekend testing these two things. Wish i had time to toss in 1800x numbers, overlock the 7740k, and tweak the 7900x more... this review was incredibly rushed...

Special thanks to janus and johan for stepping up on short notice to edit and help get it published.

Sweet write-up Joe!

EarthDog said:

Glad we can keep you here..

This review was, for all intents and purposes, written starting friday. Intel really screwed the pooch with a lot of reviewers getting samples out. The chips didnt land in my lap until saturday afternoon... was a hell of a fathers day weekend testing these two things. Wish i had time to toss in 1800x numbers, overlock the 7740k, and tweak the 7900x more... this review was incredibly rushed...

Special thanks to janus and johan for stepping up on short notice to edit and help get it published.

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NP Joe, looks great. I agree some 1800X numbers would have been a nice addition

Johan45 said:

NP Joe, looks great. I agree some 1800X numbers would have been a nice addition

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I can't wait to start to see all cpu comparisons. For me, for this platform to be successful for intel, the i7 7800x has to beat the ryzen 7 1700x by a decent margin. I know that the 1700x has two more cores but they are looking to be around similar price points, which has to be around the sweet spot for what the average consumer wants to pay. If it doesn't, I know I for one will be buying a ryzen 1700. The extra price for the intel motherboards also have to be factored into this for me as it's an extra £100 which can be spent elsewhere.

bigtallanddopey said:

I can't wait to start to see all cpu comparisons. For me, for this platform to be successful for intel, the i7 7800x has to beat the ryzen 7 1700x by a decent margin. I know that the 1700x has two more cores but they are looking to be around similar price points, which has to be around the sweet spot for what the average consumer wants to pay. If it doesn't, I know I for one will be buying a ryzen 1700. The extra price for the intel motherboards also have to be factored into this for me as it's an extra £100 which can be spent elsewhere.

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Average consumer won't pay more than 1/3 of this price Ryzen 1700X price is much higher than reasonable price for a typical home CPU. Average consumer will look at Ryzen 3 That said Skylake-X is series for barely any users. It's way to expensive for most gamers and is too strong for typical PC users. It's great for workstations but not even all as for large amount of software 3-5 year old 6 cores are more than enough. In last years graphics cards and fast storage make much bigger difference than processors.

Woomack said:

Average consumer won't pay more than 1/3 of this price Ryzen 1700X price is much higher than reasonable price for a typical home CPU. Average consumer will look at Ryzen 3 That said Skylake-X is series for barely any users. It's way to expensive for most gamers and is too strong for typical PC users. It's great for workstations but not even all as for large amount of software 3-5 year old 6 cores are more than enough. In last years graphics cards and fast storage make much bigger difference than processors.

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I should have said, average gaming consumer really. A build with a ryzen 1700 comes out at around 1k with everything. which I would say seems to be an average spend for people getting a new system.

Of course there are people looking at cheaper and others looking at only the best on offer.

Average gamer is someone who will spend about $100-150 on CPU, $200 on GPU and add some budget components to balance costs. That's my experience and part of my job for last ~14 years was selling and specifying computers (also work with hardware distributors and manufacturers). However price of average gaming computer is going up each year and hardware manufacturers try to tell us that we need something much stronger what costs 2x more.
Typical gamer will grab any 4 core CPU + something like GTX1050Ti or RX470. Ryzen 8 core build with something like GTX1070 for us seems like a normal setup but for most gamers it's already high end which they can't afford.
On the other hand sales of gaming laptops went up in last years and a lot of gamers are moving to laptops. Laptops in general have much weaker specification and is hard to find 4 core setups in reasonable price.

Going back to Skylake-X. I just feel like this generation will be even less popular than previous one as couple of years ago moving from 4 to 6 cores for not much more money was good option. Right now moving from 4-6 cores to 8+ is already too expensive while it's not bringing anything really new except more cores and general design.

Going back to Skylake-X. I just feel like this generation will be even less popular than previous one as couple of years ago moving from 4 to 6 cores for not much more money was good option. Right now moving from 4-6 cores to 8+ is already too expensive while it's not bringing anything really new except more cores and general design.

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So you're saying a 4c/4t i5 on a $400 mobo is going to be a hard sell?
Or a 4c/8t with a whole 16 PCIe lanes on the same mobo? I think you're right. LOL

Alaric said:

So you're saying a 4c/4t i5 on a $400 mobo is going to be a hard sell?
Or a 4c/8t with a whole 16 PCIe lanes on the same mobo? I think you're right. LOL

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If you think about it no one except peeps like us really know or care about lanes, plug and play is the norm. if you're a budget gamer a Ryzen 1500x with a 1060 is a damned good/cheap buy for 1080p, especially if you run a couple forums and figure out how to OC it, it seems to go neck to neck with a 7600k (and i would bet that it runs everything smoother if not faster) for $50 less

Yeah, I was kind of surprised to find out my rig is considered high end gaming in a lot of circles. Around here "high end" is a 32" 4k display and a Titan Xp or 1080 Ti. Or two. I admit that for 1080p, my rig is pretty smokin' ( ) but it ain't "high end" in this crowd. Seems I spent way more than the average gamer. A hex core Ryzen and RX 580 is probably a mainstream good gaming rig.

I said that in other thread. Budget gaming rig will be 4 cores with something like GTX1050 or RX470. 4c/8t or 6 cores +GTX1060 are already above average and most typical gamers can't afford that or just don't want to spend so much on gaming PC. Consoles are better for these gamers and part of gamers move to laptops which are slow but enough for most average gamers ( even though expensive ).
For us ( on OCF ) average is 6 cores+GTX1070. For some it's a budget build. People who are not into hardware see anything with i7 sign as total high end regardless if there are 2, 4, 6 or more cores. i9 is like 'wow' till all realize it's the same as i7 from last gen but more or less cores for the same price. 6-8 core Skylake-X still seem like a good option but for maybe 3% users. For me Skylake-X is just a product which is replacing older gen but could have its premiere in about half year. I think it would have premiere at the beginning of 2018 if not Ryzen. So it's more to show people that Intel is not losing its crown ( no matter how it looks in tests ) and that they are still the best choice ( regardless how it is in real ).

The most interesting for typical gamers will be probably Ryzen 3 and above average graphics cards like GTX1060 or RX580. I count that average is GTX1050 as it's minimum to play new games in 1080p. Still each year gaming computers are more expensive while games are not much better looking and in general are less fun each year ( or I'm getting old ).

Yup. My old Skylake at 4600 MHz with a good 1070 should be a great 1080p rig for quite a few years. At best, I'll upgrade my TV to 1440p in the future and maybe need a GTX 1080 to stay at my current level. My RAM and CPU will be more than enough for longer than my GPU, along with my SSD my games are on. In fact, a hex core Ryzen at 3900 MHz and a 1080 would be an upgrade on my current rig, for less than I spent on this one. Good times we're living in, good times.

Woomack said:

Still each year gaming computers are more expensive while games are not much better looking and in general are less fun each year ( or I'm getting old ).

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Prettier graphics and crappier story will do that, thankfully we have good exceptions to the rule.

Kenrou said:

Prettier graphics and crappier story will do that, thankfully we have good exceptions to the rule.

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Eh, my games are the opposite. War Thunder and World of Warships, with some WoW thrown in. The first two have the story built in and the third is a classic that helped forge a relationship with my daughter. Making the picture pretty is where my rig was built to be.

Alaric said:

Eh, my games are the opposite. War Thunder and World of Warships, with some WoW thrown in. The first two have the story built in and the third is a classic that helped forge a relationship with my daughter. Making the picture pretty is where my rig was built to be.

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War Thunder and World of Warships are exactly my point, pretty graphics with next to zero story, you play it for a bit and then get bored because it's always the same thing. Also to my experience only people that never played WoW or breezed through it (not taking in the massive amount of lore) actually complain about it, everyone else seems to love it (even the trolls/haters begrudgingly give it a thumbs up), hence it's one of the exceptions

Methinks were derailing the thread just a little bit though