Intel Core i7 7700K............
How good are the eighth-generation waters? Zak Storey dips his toe in Kaby Lake to find out.
Oh Kaby Lake how deep your waters run, with SSE4 and GPU fun. Should we upgrade or wait for Ryzen? Let us find out, so that concludes our little rhyme, oh what fun.
Kaby Lake is the eighth processor iteration since the introduction of the Intel Core series that started with Nehalem. For eight years, the company has pressed to push the advantage in its processor lineup, and each and every time it’s managed a marginal 10–15 per cent performance increase. This process has been based around the concept of Tick-Tock. A new architecture would be designed based on the latest transistor size, then that transistor size would be shrunk the following year. For instance, Sandy Bridge (or the Core i5-2500K) held the new architecture, while Ivy Bridge (Core i5-3570K), released a year later, was the die shrink, and so on.
However, time and time again, Intel has come up against issues. The first we saw of this was with the Haswell refresh, known as Devil’s Canyon, then once more as Broadwell was delayed for six months – each drop in transistor size becoming ever more difficult to achieve. Fast-forward to the release of Skylake, Intel’s first 14nm architecture, and we’re greeted with news that TickTock is being annexed in favour of a new scheme called PAO, or Process, Architecture, Optimisation. In short, the die shrink (the Tick) turned into the Process; the architecture (the Tock) is now, well, the Architecture; and lastly we have Optimisation. A new piece to the puzzle, where Intel tries to gain the maximum performance possible from a mature manufacturing process and a more optimised architecture. On top of giving Intel an extra year to perfect its processes, it also gives us another chip.
Ignoring Devil’s Canyon, Kaby Lake is the first true Optimisation release, and with it comes a lot of questions. If Intel’s generational gains have been so minimal, what can Kaby Lake do to make that any different? Well, that’s what we’re here to answer.
Intel’s Core i7-7700K is a fourcore, eightthreaded, lowpower rendering powerhouse. The pinnacle of what Intel has managed to achieve with Skylake and the 14nm technology. With greater performance and better overclocking potential than we’ve seen from any of Intel’s last few generations, it comes packing a whopping 4.2GHz core frequency, turboing up to 4.5GHz with boost. We were immediately impressed with its out-of-box performance. In Cinebench R15 (via Wine), we saw scores well into the high 900s, with single-core performance peaking at 194 – a sweet 8 per cent increase over Skylake. It was a similar experience across the board.
What really impressed, though, was its overclocking potential. We increased the multiplier to 48 without the core batting an eyelid, and stock voltages happily keeping the 4.8GHz chip on track. 5GHz came next, needing only a 0.05V increase to the Vcore, with temperatures sitting comfortably at 62° C under our 280mm NZXT Kraken X61. But it kept going, higher and higher, until we topped out at 5.2GHz with 1.4V added to the Vcore – a substantial increase, but temperatures still only sitting at 80° C.
Is it worth upgrading today? Well, that depends on what interests you. Generally speaking, the Z270 chipset is feature-rich, and adds additional support for PCIe devices and such. But it pales in comparison to the change from Z97 to Z170. Putting them side by side, the difference between Skylake and Kaby Lake is minimal. If you’re already set up with the sixth generation of processor, it’s not worth your time; upgrading from Ivy Bridge, Haswell, or Devil’s Canyon, on the other hand, very much is. And we can’t recommend this core enough in that regard.