Intel Core i7-7740X Skylake-X Processor Review

Introduction Intel Core i7-7740X While we've already had a lot of fun testing a bunch of X299 motherboards, as well as the flagship Core i9-7900X, we're now cracking on with the new Core i7-7740X. The flagship CPU was fast, faster than anything we've ever tested, but how many people have £1000 to spend on a new CPU? Not many I would bet. However, the new quad-core 8-thread Core i7 looks set to please the masses, with a much more reasonable £330-ish price point. That's an interesting price for a quad-core Intel CPU right now. Let's not forget the 8-Core Ryzen 1700X is the same price, and I'm eager to see where the two stack up in a head to head battle. Check out our reviews of the i9-7900X, Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Motherboard and ASUS ROG STRIX X299-E Gaming Motherboard. Essentials Product Collection - Intel® Core™ X-series Processors Vertical Segment - Desktop Processor Number - i7-7740X Lithography - 14 nm Performance Number of Cores - 4 Number of Threads - 8 Processor Base Frequency - 4.30 GHz Max Turbo Frequency - 4.50 GHz Cache - 8 MB Bus Speed - 8 GT/s DMI3 TDP - 112 W Memory Specifications Max Memory Size - 64GB Memory Types - DDR4 2666 Max # of Memory Channels - 2 ECC Memory Supported - No Expansion Options Scalability - 1S Only PCI Express - 3.0 Max # of PCI Express Lanes - 16 View the full specifications here. Testing and Methodology Test Procedure Here at eTeknix, we endeavour to disclose vital information regarding the benchmarking process so that readers can quantify the results and attempt to replicate them using their hardware. When it comes to CPU reviews, the benchmarks are pretty self-explanatory although there are a few exceptions. Please note, we prefer to re-test each CPU within a product's performance range to ensure the results are accurate and reflect any changes to our samples over time or enhancements via graphics drivers. This means we now include fewer results, but they are more reliable and easier to decipher. As always, your choice of motherboard, the silicon lottery and other factors can yield different numbers, and there's always a margin for error when using software. Therefore, your experience may vary. Each benchmark runs three times, and the average figure is taken to try to reduce the effect of hardware variation. Of course, any relevant details regarding the parameters will be listed below. Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820x2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the "normal" profile. Test Systems X299 Motherboard - Gigabyte AORUS Gaming 9 RAM - Crucial DDR4 2400Mhz Quad-Channel CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit AM4 Ryzen R5 Motherboard - ASRock Fatal1ty B350 AM4 Motherboard RAM - GEIL Evo X DDR4 2933/3200MHz CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit AM4 Ryzen R7 Motherboard - MSI XPower Titanimum X370 RAM - Crucial BAllistix 2666MHz (Soon to be upgraded and retested) CPU Cooler - Noctua D15S with dual fans Graphics Card - Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z270 Motherboard – Combination used to determine widespread performance RAM – Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB (2x8GB) 2666MHz (16-17-17) CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit X99 Motherboard – ASUS ROG STRIX X99 GAMING RAM – 32GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (4x8GB) 2400MHz (16-16-16-39) CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z170 Motherboard – ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ RAM – Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB (2x8GB) 2666MHz (16-17-17) CPU Cooler – Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card – Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply – BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive – Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis – Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System – Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Z87 Motherboard - ASUS Maximus VII Ranger RAM - 16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport XT (2 x 8GB) DDR3 1866MHz (10-10-10-30) CPU Cooler - Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Graphics Card - Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980Ti Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850 Watt Main Storage Drive - Toshiba OCZ VX500 500GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Operating System - Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Games Used Ashes of the Singularity (DirectX 12) Rise of the Tomb Raider (DirectX 12) Shadow of Mordor Tomb Raider Test Software Cinebench - available here 3DMark - available here AIDA64 Engineer - available here CPUID HWMonitor - available here CPU-Z - available here Handbrake - available here WPrime - available here Thank you Noctua, Crucial, ASUS, Gigabyte, Lian-Li, be quiet!, OCZ, for providing the hardware that helps makes these tests possible! CPU Benchmarks Ashes of the Singularity Given this is a quad-core CPU, it's able to run those cores at higher clock speeds than the newer high core count CPUs. This means in tests that only use those four cores, it will perform pretty darn well. Here you can see it pulls ahead of the Ryzen 1800X quite nicely, The 7700K overclocked a little higher, but overall it's about on par for performance here. Cinebench R15 As I was saying about core counts, multi-core testing is where it lacks the punch, and the Ryzen CPUs, as well as the new 10-core i9 pull way ahead. However, the 7740X is again right on the tail of the 7700K. I bet if our chip would have hit 5.1 GHz, it would be slightly ahead of the 7700K here. Handbrake Not a great score, but not a bad one either. While a higher core count CPU is better suited for this kind of job, those who only need to encode a few videos from time to time will find it capable of the job. WPrime The WPrime score wasn't too bad either, again on par with the 7700K when overclocked, although stock performance wasn't exactly impressive. Memory Benchmarks Bandwidth Memory bandwidth is right where we would expect it to be, nothing too crazy, but certainly competitive given the memory kit used. Latency Latency is nice and low too, which is always a good thing to see. Discrete GPU Benchmarks 3DMark So what about gaming performance? Straight away, we see a rock solid score at both stock and overclocked settings. Beating out all the Ryzen offerings, and keeping up with (but not beating) the 7700K. I must stress again, the 7700K was clocked 100Mhz higher, so the two are certainly comparable. Rise of the Tomb Raider Blazing a trail here, with Tomb Raider, although the 1800X did pull ahead, it is one of the more expensive Ryzen options. Shadow of Mordor Again, rock solid results here. We're not breaking any records, but it's about where it should be for the price. Power Consumption and Temperatures Power Consumption This is where things get extremely interesting. While the slightly higher clocked 7700K did manage to be the tiniest bit faster, it also chewed through power like it was going out of fashion. The 7740K is a lot more efficient, and that's easily one of the biggest improvements over the last generation CPU. Temperatures Well what a surprise, not only does the 7740K use a lot less power than the 7700K it's also a freaking HUGE amount cooler. Even when overclocked, this CPU ran cooler than a stock 7700K... that's pretty shameful of Intel, and only highlights how hard they dropped the ball for the 7700K in the first place. Final Thoughts Pricing The Intel Core i7-7740X LGA 2066 Skylake-X CPU is available now from most major retailers. It's currently on Amazon for £341.33. That price is about £10 more the 8-core Ryzen 1700X. However, when it comes to gaming, this fast quad-core does stay in the lead, giving you food for thought over what's best for your own needs, 8-core for multi-tasking (such as game streaming perhaps), or just straight forward gaming performance with the Intel chip. Overview I'm still a little confused as to why the whole X299 platform even exists in its current from. Sure, the new X299 motherboards opened up the support for the incredibly fast, and incredibly expensive i9-7900X. Of course, the X299 platform does merge the low-end, mid-range, and high-end CPUs onto a single socket, which is interesting, but I'm not sure that merge was something anyone needed. What the hell is going on? The main things I can see about this launch so far is that yes, the i9-7900X is very impressive, although few will be able to afford it. Then the i7-7740X we reviewed today is basically the i7-7700K with a few problems fixed. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but seeing pretty much the same performance as the old processor doesn't exactly light my fire. Seeing a freaking huge drop in thermals and power usage, however, is something I am happy to see. Time to upgrade? I wouldn't bother upgrading from a 7700K to a 7740X anytime soon. However, if you're smart and only upgrade every few generations, and are maybe leaping from a Devil's Canyon i7-4790K, then this 7740X is a good processor to upgrade to overall. When it comes to all out quad-core performance, it's anything but slow, and with a 5GHz overclock, it's a real beast when it comes to gaming. Does Ryzen have an edge when it comes to rendering, multitasking, etc? Yes, it does, but it's down to you (the consumer) to pick which one fits your requirements. If you're a gamer, don't stream much, don't do anything like Cinebench/Handbrake, then the i7 is going to do a rock solid job. It's not as fast as the i9, but it is almost £700 cheaper. One last thing! I sound like I am torn on this chip, and honestly, I think it's pretty fantastic. It's fast, runs cool, doesn't eat up too much power, and gave solid gaming performance. That's more than enough to ask from a CPU in this price range and it's exciting to see so many uniquely competitive CPUs in this price range from both Intel and AMD. Pros Competitive single and quad-core performance Fantastic for gaming Faster than Ryzen in tasks that only use 4-cores Easy to overclock Significantly cooler than the previous generation Significantly less power-hungry than the previous generation Competitively priced in terms of gaming performance Cons Ryzen offers fastest rendering/multitasking for around the same price in certain applications No major performance improvements over the last generation "With blazing fast quad-core performance, easy overclocking and low temperatures, the i7-7740X is the i7-7700K we deserved."