01-03-2017, 10:07 PM
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/2419...ts-desktop
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.