Quote:The Core i7-7700K we’ll be reviewing today has a base clock of 4.2GHz and a maximum turbo frequency of 4.5GHz (our chip topped out at 4.4GHz under full load). That compares well against the Core i7-6700K (4GHz base, 4.2GHz Turbo), particularly since our 6700K refused to budge above 4GHz under load, despite plenty of thermal and power headroom.

On paper, the Core i7-7700K is only 5% and 7% faster than the 6700K in terms of base clock and turbo clock, but the practical results we saw showed a larger clock gap in practice. Intel’s other 7th generation SKUs show slightly larger gaps — the Core i5-7600K (3.8GHz base, 4.2GHz Turbo) has a 9% higher base clock and an 8% higher boost clock than the Core i5-6600K (3.5GHz base, 3.9GHz Turbo). This trend holds true even 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 contrast, has a 2.2GHz base clock and a 2.8GHz boost clock.
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As much as I’d like to write something exciting about the Core i7-7700K, everything I can think of qualifies as damning with faint praise. It’s a solid CPU core with some modest clock speed improvements, a few new media engine capabilities, and a slightly improved power 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 chips are definitely the way to go, and we’re downright curious about the upcoming Core i3-7350K.

But 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 10% faster than Skylake in a modestly improved power envelope. Considering that Skylake launched 18 months ago now, 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 in the year means that journalists who might have enjoyed spending time with family and friends had to work overtime to get the review done, given that CES kicks off on January 5.

Last 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 small year-on-year gains since Sandy Bridge launched in 2011. Much of this is due to physics being a great deal less cooperative, and if you compare Intel’s performance in the 15W – 35W space the company has delivered much larger gains. That’s not much comfort to desktop die-hards who remember when you could count on a new CPU delivering 2x the performance of your last CPU within 24-36 months, and it 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 great motherboard, GSkill’s DDR4-3200 worked flawlessly with every motherboard we tested, Optane may deliver some game-changing performance in the future, and if you need a new CPU after holding off on upgrading for several years, there’s no reason not to upgrade to the Core i7-7700K. That is, of course, 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, there’s a good argument to be made for waiting and seeing a little longer.

Quote:We already mentioned that we used retail CPUs for all of our tests. This means that our results should be representative of what you can expect when you purchase a new Kaby Lake-based processor. In light of our experiences, early adopters should be aware that CPU quality can vary widely, and this is especially true for early production runs. We experienced this very problem with our Core i7-7700K retail sample.

It turns out that MSI has assessed 30 more retail Core i7-7700Ks. For each of them, the company found the minimum voltage necessary for stable operation under a given workload at a specific frequency. Thirty CPUs might not be a huge number, but it still yields a good idea of how much individual samples vary in quality.

The curve tells us that the Core i7-7700K in our German lab falls toward the bottom of the distribution. Both the voltages and the maximum frequency of “only” 5 GHz are the same as the ones on the bottom of the curve. This explains why that particular processor didn’t do so well under Intel’s Power Thermal Utility: its quality is just too low, necessitating a voltage increase that’s too high to allow for sufficient cooling.
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Alright, so Germany’s lab has two sub-par Core i7-7700Ks, and that's the hardware used in our performance, power consumption, and temperature benchmarks. However, the U.S. lab does have its own retail sample that consumes significantly less power. It also runs cooler.

We weren’t able to run all of our measurements in Germany and the U.S. with identical air coolers, so we went with compact closed-loop liquid coolers instead. Unfortunately, we still weren't able to achieve completely comparable performance. The Corsair H100i v2 in our U.S. lab gave us sporadic issues and generally didn’t cool as well. Consequently, we're only comparing power consumption results. We should still get plenty of information from those data points, though.

Whether we look at idle power consumption or the readings under Intel's Power Thermal Utility, the difference between samples is massive. And remember, these are retail processor we're comparing, not CPUs hand-selected by Intel for the press.

The difference between the CPU package and readings from the IA cores shrinks to a mere 2W. And leakage currents at the CPU’s highest temperature compared to before it warms up rise by a maximum of 1W. Compared to the four other CPU samples that we tested, this one’s really something special.

In this case, higher voltages paired with lower power consumption must mean lower currents, which keep the CPU significantly cooler.Once again, the Kaby Lake generation will see enthusiasts receiving great CPUs, mediocre CPUs, and terrible CPUs that still managed to make it through quality control. For the time being, we’ll have to live with this, since the manufacturing process isn’t mature enough to produce consistent high-quality results. We haven’t seen extreme differences like these since the days of Intel’s first quad-core CPU, the Q6600.

Quote:Yikes. There's almost no difference between the Core i7-6700K and the Core i7-7700K in these synthetic benchmarks of memory performance. What's surprising is that our motherboard's support for DDR4-3866 lets those chips move much more data around than Intel CPUs with DDR3-1866 hooked up. In fact, the Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs paired with the Z270 platform are elbowing in on the results the Core i7-5960X [sic] posted in these same AIDA64 tests way back when. That's kind of scary performance from a dual-channel memory setup.

Quote:Last 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 small year-on-year gains since Sandy Bridge launched in 2011. Much of this is due to physics being a great deal less cooperative, and if you compare Intel’s performance in the 15W – 35W space the company has delivered much larger gains. That’s not much comfort to desktop die-hards who remember when you could count on a new CPU delivering 2x the performance of your last CPU within 24-36 months, and it wouldn’t surprise me at this point if Intel was working on a new clean-sheet design.

Quote:I’m a bit torn over Kaby Lake. On the one hand, it’s a fine update as far as it goes. There’s not much reason for Skylake owners to upgrade, but review results from the 7700K show that it generally outperforms Devil’s Canyon from 2014, to say nothing of Sandy Bridge or even earlier chips. Squeezing an extra 8-10% out of Skylake in equivalent power envelopes is no small accomplishment given how hard it’s been to move the ball on x86 performance.

At the same time, however, Intel has been working with Sandy Bridge-derived architectures since 2011 and doesn’t have much to show for it — at least, not compared with previous rates of performance improvements. A great deal of this is due to simple physics and the intrinsic difficulty of designing a core that is more efficient, draws the same amount of power (or less, ideally) and provides increased performance without resorting to clock speed gains to deliver it. In a talk several years ago, former Intel Chief Architect Bob Colwell estimated that modern chips are 50-60x more efficient than the original 8086 — but they clock 1,000x higher than that core (4GHz compared with 4MHz). For all the gains we’ve gotten from building better cores, the gains from clock speed are more than an order of magnitude higher.

I mentioned this in the Core i7-7700K review, but it bears repeating: I have absolutely no inside knowledge that Intel is contemplating a new uarch and am not claiming it is. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the company does go this route, especially if Zen proves competitive against the 7th Generation core family. With Apple breathing down its neck with the iPad Pro and its old enemy preparing to return to the arena, it’s a good time to revisit old assumptions and see if new tricks can be found to boost perf, cut power, and deliver a superior product.

Quote:The Intel Core i7-7350K processor is a quick dual-core processor with Intel Hyper-Threading technology that delivers outstanding performance in lightly threaded applications. This processor won’t challenge recent Intel quad-core processors in heavily threaded applications, but that is why it has a $168 price point. The Intel Core i7-7700K processor cores has 1ku tray pricing at $339.00, so when you think about it the pricing makes sense as both have the same base clock speed and the Core i3-7350K has half as many physical cores. Half price for half the cores.

Overclocking performance on the Intel Core i3-7350K processor was solid and that is what most will expect from a Intel ‘K’ series unlocked processor. We managed to go from the processors 4.2 GHz base clock to 5.1 GHz by simply increasing the CPU voltage and multiplier. Overclocking like this is easy and can be easily done by novice overclockers in just a few minutes. If the performance numbers in this article weren’t high enough for you we suggest taking a closer look at the Intel Core i5-7600K unlocked processor that has the same 4.2 GHz base clock, but four physical cores along with more cache, and an actual boost clock for $242. If you want something with four cores and Intel Hyper-Threading technology, the Intel Core i7-7700K is still the way to go for $339. The Intel Core i7-7700K might be double the price, but it is also twice as fast when it comes to transcoding and other CPU intensive tasks.

This processor is ideal for an enthusiast on a budget that wants an unlocked processor that they can overclock for doing light tasks. For things like web surfing and simple daily tasks you can’t feel the difference between the Core i3-7350K and the Core i7-7700K. It’s only when you get to converting movies or manipulating 3D images when you wish you had extra cores.