X299 Ultra-Light: Intel's Kaby Lake-X Core i7-7740X, Core i5-7640X and what to do

1 - Einführung und Übersicht 2 - X299-Chipsatz und Testsystem 3 - Anomalien und Probleme, Battlefield 1 4 - AotS Escalation, Civization VI, GTA V 5 - Shadow of Mordor, Project Cars, Rise of the Tomb Raider 6 - Workstation- und HPC-Performance 7 - Leistungsaufnahme und Übertaktung 8 - Temperaturverläufe und Delta-Werte 9 - Zusammenfasung und Fazit

The Basin Falls X299 chipset

The Kaby Lake-X processors sit in an LGA2066 socket (R4), powered by an X299 chipset with 6 watts of power consumption. The 14nm chiset supports an x4 DMI 3.0 connection, which is similar to a PCIe link between the processor and the chipset. This results in an increase in throughput compared to broadwell's DMI 2.0 connection by a whopping 2GB/s. Basin Falls also supports 30 HSIO (High-Speed I/O) lanes, which equates to a total of 68 available lanes for the high-end models, but which is more of a land of unfulfillable dreams for the Kaby Lake-X.

After all, this allows the motherboard manufacturers to natively realize up to eight SATA 3.0 and 10 USB 3.0 ports, but X299 does not require a native implementation of Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 Gen 2. Intel, however, plans to do so later for upcoming chipsets. For this purpose, X299 already supports up to three RST PCIe 3.0 x4 storage media, although the Kaby Lake-X CPUs cannot take advantage of this due to their PCI lane limitations.

The MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC

The MSI motherboard we use is not the top-of-the-range model from the Taiwanese manufacturer, but it is certainly well suited to gain initial experience with the X299 chipset. The Bios versions.12 and .13 were used, but they showed little difference in performance.

The board supports all current CPUs with the socket 2066, i.e. also the two respective Kaby Lake-X models. Note the connection of the PCIe expansion slots, which depend on the model and the available lanes (44, 28 and 16 at Kaby Lake-X). A triple crossfire or SLI is easily possible in theory, but in practice we would rather advise against such a constellation.

Power consumption test system, workstation and HPC benchmarks

The new test system and the methodology we have already described in great detail in the basic article "So we are testing graphics cards, as of February 2017" and so, for the sake of simplicity, we now only refer to this detailed description, which is modified form can also apply to the CPUs. So if you want to read everything again, you are welcome to do so.

In this case, only the hardware configuration with CPU, RAM, motherboard, as well as the new cooling is different, so that the summary in table form quickly gives a brief overview of the system used here and today: