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Intel i7-7700K Revisit: Benchmark vs. 9700K, 2700, 9900K, & More

2018-12-30
revisiting the Intel I 777 100k today which came out in January of 2017 for about three hundred and forty dollars us the 7700 K was shortly followed by the 8700 K launching later in the same year but with an additional two cores and four threads but if you remember back to that time not many 8700 KS were available only a few motherboards were available and all of them were Z 370 so it was a rush to launch and it was really just after the 7700 K so that was a big gain and it was one which stacked atop the 7700 K is already relatively high overclocking potential for regular 4.9 - maybe 5.0 gigahertz overclocks this revisit looks at how these 7700 K compares to modern coffee like 8,000 and 9,000 CPUs alongside modern rise in CPUs from the Zen plus generation before that this video is brought to you by us and the GN store one of the best ways to support us and get something in return is to grab an item from the GN store like one of our blue beer glasses with a gold halo featuring the popular teardown logo or one of our critically acclaimed mod mats with wiring diagrams and a GPU tear down grid we also have a brand new black and blue mousepad that many of you requested now available on the store we keep selling out of things thanks to you all but we've been working hard to get it back in stock go to store documents access net to grab something today back when we reviewed the 7700 K originally it was one of those Intel launches where it just wasn't that exciting and that was sort of common at the time where I mean it's four cores it's eight threads and it's a little bit faster than the previous one so compared to the 6700 K if you already had a 67 100k really wasn't worth upgrading and it was barely worth upgrading from a 4790k or something like that so it wasn't the most exciting product at launch but it did overclock fairly well which has become a bit of a trend with Intel CPUs lately now the bigger difference is when the 8700 K launched thereafter because with the 8700 K suddenly you've got a core and thread increase and now Intel's really starting to feel some some competition from AMD so that's where things got interesting unfortunately for 7700 K owners who purchased in around January of 2017 it was about nine months later than the 8700 k became available even though it was limited in quantity at the time you can't help but feel a little bit burned by that it's it's just a faster launch cycle then it's typical we wanted to then go back to the 7700 K and look at how does it do today if you had waited a little bit longer how much performance would you have gained instead so as a refresher this is a four core eight thread part it's hyper threaded of course 4.2 gigahertz base 4.5 gigahertz boost and eight megabytes of total cache so the cache has gone up as well on modern CPUs about 340 bucks for comparison the 9700 K which we just reviewed although it'll either be on just before just after this video on our channel the 9700 K eight cores eight threads instead and it's 3.6 gigahertz base four point nine boost and then the cache is up to 12 megabytes and it's about four hundred to four hundred twenty dollars depending on where you buy it and when you buy it and we saw some at as low as four hundred on new egg and I think we bought ours for about four hundred thirty depending on the time you bought so it's a it's a price increase it's still an i7 people felt a bit weird about the 9700 K just because it is a port that could be hyper threaded but was obviously elected not to be hyper threaded because you've got the 9900 K above that so there's some products I couldn't age from going on there which is pretty normal it's just a matter of is it really I mean what are they what do you get for that product segmentation is there any benefit it's the consumer so we're gonna look at the 7700 K see how it compares to the 9700 k the 9900 k and we've got all the rise in numbers in there as well in case you're considering to move to something like the 2700 which would be a bit of a lateral move in gaming but could be an upgrade and something like blender for product production or 3d title based rendering workloads if you want to check that out as well it is in this content so let's get into testing f1 20:18 uses the ego engine by Codemasters and places the 77/100 case stock cpu at 241 FPS average still a fully capable performer in this type of game it is bottleneck in our 28 eti evidently but performance is still high enough to support most other high on GPUs without stifling them too much a 1080 TI would be a good fit for instance this is highly dependent on title so this positioning may change with other games and the bottlenecking factor of the high on GPU will also fluctuate the stock 7700 K is flanked primarily by the preceding Devil's Canyon 4790k at 218 FPS average and by the succeeding i7 8700 K at 248 FPS average for the 8700 K and 7700 K the differences are negligible it would be difficult to notice 0.1 millisecond difference in frame time if not impossible Verizon comparisons the closest would be the 2700 at 4.2 gigahertz which ranks at 212 FPS average and nears the 4790k and performance a frame time comparison would be apt here as well enabling us to better look at the performance of frame consistency or as some people like to call it smoothness the y-axis is frame to frame interval or frame time measured in milliseconds and the x-axis is the frame count we want a consistent line with as few deviations from the mean as possible and when there is a deviation we want it to be fewer than 8 to 12 milliseconds change frame the frame as that tends to be about the human perceptual range for frame time consistency or inconsistency as it were this plot gets busy fast but staggering the line reveal helps a bit the 7700 K ends up right around where the 8700 K is when both are overclocked to 5.1 and 5.0 gigahertz respectively the result is a roughly equivalent frame to frame interval with also roughly equivalent frame time spikes when they occur the spikes that never exceed 20 milliseconds for the 7700 K so while there are a few that are noticeable in play there aren't enough spikes really Marv the experience meaningfully or at least not meaningfully different from the other CPUs every CPU AMD and Intel seems to encounter these spikes in this game making it more likely a function of the engine itself at 1440p scaling remains the same and the 77 higher K is firmly planted between the 8700 cage stock CPU and 86 hundred KS stock CPU overclocking the 7700 K puts it just below the 9600 K stock CPU showing limitations of the KB lake architecture and for core eight thread approach Assassin's Creed origins gives us a look at a Ubisoft title something that far cry 5 will enable as well once we get to it next with Assassin's Creed origins at 1080p medium the 7,700 case stock CPU benchmarks at 100 FPS average which places it just below the 8600 case TOC CPUs 103 FPS average frame time consistency between the two is functionally the same and scales about as you'd expect the overclocked 1700 at 3.9 gigahertz is also not too distant from the 7700 K although 0.1% lowers begin to dip a bit as for the 4790k just for perspective that's at 86 FPS average and around the performance of a stock 1,700 with the Intel i5 2600 K at 3 FPS average when stock over clocked in at 7700 K puts it at 107 FPS average around the performance of a 5 gigahertz 8600 K generationally the 8700 K offers meaningful uplifts to 113 FPS average when stock as compared to 100 FPS average on these stock 7700 K while the 9700 K pushes the bar to 127 FPS average stock we can see that the 9900 K pushes it to about 135 FPS average stock so we've got a pretty staggered staffing there far cry 5 is next and gives us another Ubisoft title with a different underlying engine at 1080p normal this one place is the 7700 K is stock CPU at 115 FPS average or right above the r5 2601 set to 4.2 gigahertz the 7700 K at five point one gigahertz lands it between the 8600 case stock CPU and 8400 stock CPU so not that exciting overall for the old 7700 K but still not bad for hanging on at 1440p the stack is similar the 7700 K at five point one gigahertz is right around where the 7 960 X it's ahead of the 4.2 gigahertz r5 2600 and behind at the stock 8700 K it's somewhat meaningful amount one note here with regard to the I 5s though like the i-5 8400 and I 580 600 K we've seen issues with i-5 specifically because of the thread deficit not because there are fives in far cry 5 is something we've talked about in the past recently even and something we need to still look into more but the bigger thing here is that even though there's a bit of a performance lead in some instances for the average the frame times might not be better something that we can hopefully put on the screen to show you a previous frame time chart illustrating that with one of the other i5 CPUs and that just comes down to how many threads are available for this game because it can actually leverage eight threads if you give them to it as we always note civilization six and other Grand Campaign games are all about turn completion time or the time required for AI players to figure out their next moves with multiple AI players in the game it can take minutes to get back to your next play if on a slow processor and that becomes annoying for gameplay the i7 7700 K ends about twelve point eight seconds stock placing it around the same place as the r7 2700 at 4.2 gigahertz and just behind the 79 60 X at stock speeds these two flanking CPUs help illustrate that this game prefers frequency to threads that we can still make use of both as illustrated by these 79 ATX e at the top of the chart it's just a matter of having enough frequency with a relatively big overclock to five point one gigahertz at least for the 7700 K the CPU ends up at twelve point two seconds for a turn time reduction of five percent of the stock 7700 K the overclocked result puts it around the 8700 Kate stock CPU at twelve point five seconds and not too distant from the eighty six hundred K at five gigahertz which benefits from a few additional physical cores and some architectural advancements the 9700 K performs significantly faster than the stock 7700 K at eleven point seven seconds for its turn time completion and posts a reduction of eight point six percent for perspective of the product stack shift this generation the ninety nine hundred K ends up at eleven point four seconds when at five point two gigahertz a noteworthy reduction over the 7700 K as for how much you notice these changes that will depend on how many AI players are present and how complex the turns get blender is last giving us a look at production capabilities of the 7700 K as compared to modern CPUs this is where the 77 hard K starts to lose its relative stay in power shown in other applications like games because tile-based renderers like blender we'll leverage one thread per tile being drawn the 7700 K stock see butanes 38 minutes to render the GN monkey heads or 47 minutes to render the GM logo intro animation overclock and 7700 k to 5 gigahertz because 5.1 was unstable and crashing plants it firmly at the performance level of the r5 1600 were close enough to be a fair comparison the ad 600 K at 5 gigahertz holds the lead over the 7700 K despite the two thread deficit and the 9700 K provides a significant time reduction from 38 minutes on the city 700 K stock to 29 minutes on the 9700 K a time reduction of 25% is noticeable in rendering workloads but Rison still does better here at the same price category for an example we can highlight the 2700 stock CPU and a 26 minute monkeyhead render time or the overclocked variant at 4.2 gigahertz with a 23 minute completion time if you're using blender or other renderers where a new tile is generated for each thread this is where AMD cpus come into play chances are that a 7700 K owner bought their system before rising came out so we wanted to highlight what AMD has done well while you've been away recapping all those charts if you overclocked you're 7700 K you're still doing pretty well it's held on ok look at a game like f1 20:18 where it's not the most intensive game in the world considering we're in the hundreds of FPS but it shows that with the right game combination you're still doing fine with a 7700 K so should you upgrade it still feels a little bit early in a lot of these titles to do so but if you really want to spend 500 bucks or well I guess you're buying a new motherboard you're definitely spending 500 even if you go with a 9700 K then you got a bit of a boost yes absolutely it's just you really have to evaluate how much does that extra reduction in frame time matter to you because for a lot of people probably not so much not not $500 worth of importance and maybe waiting a little bit longer or upgrading a GPU would matter instead now if you're getting the 2080 TI for example it would be a good time to upgrade because you're going to be bottlenecked by the cpu as we saw in these charts anywhere in the chart where the 77 hard K is significantly or meaningfully lower than the top item in that chart that is the illustration of a CPU bottle and that happens pretty much everywhere as you move up and resolution the frequency of that occurring goes down so like 1440p suddenly it's not so bad but I mean you all know how a bottleneck can work so that's kind of where we look at potential upgrade and of course it all depends on what kind of framerate you want as well some people are more picky about that than others with regard to something like 200 Hertz for example either way though somebody's about hardcase done decently it hasn't held on and quite the same way that the 2600 K has 2600 K is still a really impressive part it's considered when it came out it's a phenomenal performer even today the 7700 K does just fine and if you have an overclocked it's probably a good time to consider doing so if that's something you feel comfortable with because it does give you a decent hour performance in a lot of these titles but is it worth upgrading is it's kind of a weird nebulous area to be because it's just it's not that old January 2017 most people are probably waiting about another year before they upgrade on average it's about a three-year upgrade cycle for people in the industry so by that point you'll have probably ice lake or sunny Cove best CPUs available which is when we probably push you towards waiting on but if you really need an upgrade today it's one of like always if you feel like you're being held back by your CPU if you make money with your computer through work and it's holding you back then absolutely upgrade because it'll make you more money more return or if you're just an enthusiast and you can't stand not being the best well I guess there's nothing we can tell you but clearly there's been improvement and the 9900 K is a bigger improvement than most but it's also more expensive and so for that we would probably look at waiting maybe another at least six months or so before you really consider a serious upgrade so that's it for this one let us know what you've over clogged your 7700 K - you're just curious five-point ones pretty good for hours but I know there's a higher and lower ones out there subscribe for more as always go to store ty cameras access Nets pick my shirt like this one or one of the mod mats that we have on the table here and you can go to patreon.com/scishow Saxons house out there as well thank you for watching I'll see you all next time
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