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

We want to precede today's test with a small episode that we experienced at a motherboard manufacturer when it came to Intel's request that kaby Lake-X still have a cheap board with only four memory banks. 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 provides a PCIe link between the ... What we noticed during testing We took a little more time to counter some of the anomalies we noticed when benchmarking the new Kaby Lake-X CPUs. To what extent the 3DMark is now really a reliable reference... Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12) Let's take the bow to the first game, which we have documented in as much detail as always. Purely in terms of computing power, there are no surprises and all CPUs are also fixed in time... Project Cars (DX12) This game demands the CPUs, but you don't actually need more than 4 real cores. Here, only clock counts and thus also the IPC. The Core i7-7740X can be overclocked and not overclocked. In... Introduction During the launch article of AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs, we had already explained all workstation and HPC benchmarks in great detail and also questioned the background for many results in some cases even down to the last detail. En... Important preliminary remark As with Kaby Lake, Intel has no longer realized the contact between Die and Heatspreader by metallic solder at Kaby Lake-X, but is also available here on cheaper TIM (Thermal Interface material, i.e. neat heater... Cooling with the Chiller crowbar In order to achieve comparable results for the launch article of the Core i7-7900X, we use the Alphacool Ice Age Chiller 2000, as with all articles on AMD's Ryzen, which also has a load-independent, constank... Summary The bottom line is that the performance differences between Kaby Lake and Kaby Lake-X are rather marginal, but we haven't really found the meaning of this whole venture either. While the Vi...

What we noticed during testing

We took a little more time to counter some of the anomalies we noticed when benchmarking the new Kaby Lake-X CPUs. To what extent the 3DMark can really be a reliable reference, let's face it. However, the following results are reproducible on the mainboard. The test, which we repeated over and over again under different conditions, shows very clearly that the DrawCalls per second showed a huge disadvantage of the Core i7-7740X, which could not even be lifted in the extremely overclocked state. :

We will see later, also in some workstation tests, that we occasionally came across such disadvantages of the Kaby Lake-X CPU again and again exactly when it came to a predominantly graphical output, while the compute parts did not raise any questions. and perform as you might have expected. Whether the problem is chipset-related, or whether the drivers have made a dash through the bill, we can not answer exactly today, but only guess.

An example where such weaknesses as in API overhead did not play a role, for example, is The AI test of Civilzation VI (under DirectX12). Here the pure beat before the thirst goes at the socket and so the overclocked Core i7-77400X then wins quite clearly. There is no trace of the oddities that have just been noticed.

Battlefield 1 (DX11) and GPU Limitation

We also intentionally built in a supposed lapsus, because we deliberately let all CPUs run into the GPU limit. But already with the Min-FPS there are interesting (and reproducible) outliers.

This difference continues with the frametimes and their variances. However, the Uneveness index most closely suited to subjective sentiment gives a warning: Whether Intel or AMD, no CPU provides unpleasant scenes or subjectively perceptible hangers.

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