Tuesday, July 18th 2017
Benchmarks Find Intel Core i7-7700K Better Than i7-7800X for Gaming
Over at Techspot, Steven Walton managed to get a hold of Intel's new six-core, 12-thread Core i7-7800X CPU, and chose to take it for a spin over a levy of gaming benchmarks. The results don't bode particularly well for Intel's new top i7 offering, though: it is soundly beat by its smaller, svelter brother in virtually all gaming tasks.
Out-of-the-box results are somewhat in line with what we would expect: the Core i7-7700K does bring about a base clock increased by 700 MHz compared to the i7-7800X (4.2 GHz vs 3.5 GHz), and has a higher boost clock to boot (4.5 GHz vs 4 GHz.) And as we've seen over and over again, including with Intel rival AMD's Ryzen offerings, frequency usually trumps core count when it comes to performance when applications are exposed more than four cores. And this leads to Walton's results: the Core i7 7700K is still king in pure FPS terms, coming in with a much more attractive proposition than the 7800X in both minimum and maximum FPS, as well as power consumption.
Now, to be fair, most of us were probably expecting that: consumer application optimization for high core-count processors (if we can actually call a six-core a high core-count processor in a soon to be Threadripper-infused world, but I digress) is sorely lacking. However, what really paints Intel's i7-7800X in a bad light is that its performance continues to be lacking even when it has a frequency advantage over the 7700K. As you can see in the performance metrics, a Core 17-7800X overclocked to 4.7 GHz (with a 500 MHz advantage over stock clocks of the 7700K and 200 MHz over its Boost clock) still performs slower than it. The stock 7700K has 5% higher minimum and maximum framerates than the 7800X, despite being clocked lower, having a ridiculously lower amount of L2 cache, and having about the same total L3 cache (which actually results in an about 30% lower available L3 cache per core.) And these lower frame rates are delivered with a 41% higher idle power consumption, and 23% higher gaming power consumption. Check the source link for some detailed benchmarks. As for all this, it seems that while Intel likes to take digs on AMD for their "glued-together" desktop dies repurposed for servers, Intel's 7800X, which has its cache hierarchy and core interconnect re-architected for servers, may be little more than a repurposed server CPU for the desktop crowds...
Source:
Techspot
Out-of-the-box results are somewhat in line with what we would expect: the Core i7-7700K does bring about a base clock increased by 700 MHz compared to the i7-7800X (4.2 GHz vs 3.5 GHz), and has a higher boost clock to boot (4.5 GHz vs 4 GHz.) And as we've seen over and over again, including with Intel rival AMD's Ryzen offerings, frequency usually trumps core count when it comes to performance when applications are exposed more than four cores. And this leads to Walton's results: the Core i7 7700K is still king in pure FPS terms, coming in with a much more attractive proposition than the 7800X in both minimum and maximum FPS, as well as power consumption.
136 Comments on Benchmarks Find Intel Core i7-7700K Better Than i7-7800X for Gaming
NS2, HL2, War Thunder, PS2, most RTSs, MMOs, and the list goes on and on for single thread limited games.
when you game on 1440p 120hz ULMB single thread is a pain.
Not sure why the gap closes when overclocking though...that makes little sense to me on KL cpu as it does not have that cache issue SL-X does.
Seems you are mixing KL and SL-x? They overclocmed the 7700k to 4.9.. a 900mhz difference.
With the IPC you mentioned earlier. Is it that different from kaby lake? i dont think they are that much different. Change from kaby to skylake wasnt great probably same is here.
wow intel just wow
Star Wars Empire at War and RCT3 are horribly single thread limited. Total war games are also single thread limited on a 4.8GHz SKL.
HL2 was CPU limited until 4GHz+ SB came out. My 920QM I ran at 3.33GHz to almost maintain 120 FPS. Wasn;t until SB/IB i no longer had FPS issues.
Sorry, I didn't quite get your IPC point - can't figure which way round you mean it? :confused:
A 7700k will be fine for 3 years+. If this mangy core thing takes off, you may find a few titles neededing more than 8 threads and holding things back... but, a year? Come on now...
Weve been waiting for multithreaded games since q6600 came out what 7 years ago? Just now are we starting to see some games use more than 4 threads.. and we can can count that number on one hand.
What titles max out 8 threads on a 7700k, btw?
Of course that also depends of the game scenario but it does jump to 100% utilization for the 7700k OC'ed to 5Ghz.
Also, i dont see 70% use in bf1 with a 1080 at 1440p...
I could see it. 70% was there not all the time but it was there. You wanted an example and here it is.
It will last 3 years or even more. My 3770k is still running great but in games it is a bottleneck though you can still play. If 7700k becomes a bottleneck which i believe it will you would still play games with decent FPS but the bottleneck is there and this game shows it. With Volta coming out and i'm sure you believe it will be faster than 1080 Ti the bottleneck will be more apparent than now. Wouldn't you agree? besides more FPS and higher res will also impact CPU utilization. Volta comes out next year (if I'm correct). Look at the utilization difference in BF1 with the 1080 vs 1080Ti. from 70(maximum that i have noticed) to a 100. Since you didn't see the 70 claiming it was less than that then just imagine the 7700k CPU utilization in that game when Volta comes out being faster than 1080 Ti. Remember that's just one title example. BF1 is not that much CPU intensive but higher resolutions(1440p is more common now) and higher FPS counts (everybody wants 144Hz monitors) will impact CPU's pretty much in that game. There are plenty games that would use all the 7700k's resources and max the utilization out. With Volta which will be faster is like nothing. Keep in mind that games are also becoming more and more demanding.
BTW I'd like to look at the CPU utilization level with 7820X in that game. couldn't find one yet.
Oh yeah, is a bottleneck if you consider that 150fps (3770k) vs 155fps (7700k) to be bottleneck.
Watch the video above more carefully. The only thing that is the bottleneck in that game is the GPU who is on average at 95% most of the time, while the CPU is 55%.
Please do tell again how the CPUs are a bottleneck in games...:nutkick::shadedshu: