Gadgetory

Intel seemingly moved its KB Lake X and skylake X CPU launches up possibly because of Verizon and with those launches that comes a new CPU at the top end an 18 core 36 thread chip the 79 80 X e we talking about that today along with a total of eight other enthusiast desktop CPUs that have been detailed so far before that this coverage is brought to you by Corsair and their new t1 race chair which is a bucket seat style gaming chair the chair is equipped with rollerblade wheels and it's probably at $350 you can learn more at the link in the description below starting us off with Intel's marketing materials because that's all we really have right now for these CPUs they're marketing that advertises the new x-series of CPUs cable ax and Skylark acts as ready for extreme mega tasking which is presumably a step down from Giga tasking and a step up from kill at asking for something like that they've also said that it's ready for advanced gaming which is presumably different from gaming and the VR readiness the VR of course is still a major buzzword and it is often attached to high on products so not a surprise there however we did test the Intel 7700 K so their own product 7700 something dollar CPU and r7 1700 both were effectively perfect for VR there was no distinguishable difference between them and gaming we have a whole video on it that's pretty long goes in depth so $2,000 CPU probably not necessary for VR but we'll go through all the stuff anyway the new CPU scale from 240 ish to about $2,000 so that's down from the four thread line up to the 36th redline the 18 for 36 thread monster at the low end it's still an i5 and i7 from the KB Lake line they are KB Lake X with the new socket LGA 2066 and those CPUs are basically a refresh over the 7600 K and 7700 K slightly different clocks things like that the 70 640 X and 77 40 X are the KB Lake X CPUs with the rest falling in the skylake family of architectures all the CPUs socket into the new LGA 2066 socket of X 299 boards which hosts 30 HS i/o lanes maximally supporting 20 or PCIe gen3 lanes note of course that the chipset support of PCIe is not beneficial for graphic configurations outside of x4 set up an SLI demands x8 minimally and pulls its lanes from the CPU instead of the chipset regardless this move coincides with what we saw on Kaiba lake as for the CPU PCIe lanes moved from 16 on kb lake x parts to 28 Lane and 44 Lane options on skylake X the CPU to watch for this lineup will be v 7800 X which is going to compete the most directly with the rise in r7 line in price and target use cases so that would be the one to watch out for the next one is the 79 60 X and this one's a bit more expensive but it will compete probably with where we expect AMD thread refer to land in terms of price and performance target is more of the high-end desktop area the least interesting of these CPUs so far would be BKB lake refreshes like the 77 40 X which is going to be basically a 100 mega Hertz boost to the base clock and that's really about it other than a new socket type so that's what we're looking at right now in terms of the i9 CPU just this kind of a side note to bring up in our original eye 9 news video and we talked about the i9 rumors of CPUs there were a couple comments that I thought deserved addressing and those were the ones that said look this is what competition looks like Andy has pressured Intel and to finally creating a new line of CPUs the i9 CPUs and while there is competition that is pressuring Intel and that is certainly a good thing this is not the result of it because these CPUs have existed for quite some time it's not like Rison came out and install just started pumping out silicon of a new CPU now they have branded new CPUs as i9 that's what's new they've branded something that the silicon already existed for and they've been developing for quite a while CPUs take something like 18 months start to finish they spend the last six months of their life in testing validation and silicon fabrication so these are things that have existed for a while but their launch date seems to have been moved up and then we have the new i9 branding which is of course noteworthy and probably somewhat a response to thread rip and risin with a spotlight on these CPUs there's still a lot undocumented we don't yet know clocks for instance though we know core count is up there it'll come down to how high Intel can clock these higher-end CPUs that are at the very top end of the list we know the clocks to the bottom end and outside of clocks and cores there have also been changes to the caching system we don't yet have full details but we can get into the basics from the very limited information we have it seems as if Intel is reducing its last level cache in favor of larger l1 and l2 caches which theoretically reduces cache misses and probes into l3 this should assist in latency overall which is further aided by increasing the private cache sizes to one megabyte per core but beyond this we can only really speculate Intel makes it a big point to highlight the range of uses for the new x-series CPU suggesting that KB Lake K series CPUs are needed for 4k or vr gaming leaving the non ksq CPUs marked as unsupportive of 4k or VR this is an interesting marching slide seen as we've benchmarked non-case CPUs in both VR and 4k and have found them perfectly adequate what's more interesting is that oculus and HTC both specify CPUs as low as I 3s and i-5 as B&B already something we've also tested and agree with so it's interesting that Intel is attempting to sacrifice its own line here saying that the case qi7 CVS are needed for VR considering that it is plainly untrue so as if to find a reason for these higher end TV is to exist in a gaming machine where we've kind of already set the bar saying that the 7700 K is really the top end of what you need when we did our 1800 X review a subsequent 1700 reviews to find a reason for them to exist in gaming machines Intel has said that you should buy them for 12 K gaming which as we all know is a very common use case so there's pointed out 12 K a triple 4k screen gaming as the primary target use case of something like the $2,000 CPU and those high-end devices and things that you would need above the case Q of i7s for when you're playing games that's kind of what they're looking at just to give you an idea of where Intel setting their own bar for gaming performance with these CPUs they are also well really to kind of explain their point here the only reason that makes sense is not because of the CPUs performance itself that's kind of relevant what matters is the land count and assignment so they're saying with 28 the 44 lanes you can do more video cards that is absolutely true and yes you would have more bandwidth for them however both AMD and NVIDIA have been kind of dialing back support and marketing behind multi-gpu set up especially Nvidia so where Intel is mentioning triple or quadruple II supported on these new x-series CPUs the fact of the matter is that even Nvidia does not really commit to three or four-way SLI anymore in fact you have or at least at one point had to get a special key to unlock anything beyond two-way SLI and we all know how SLI scaling works in games anyway so I kind of leave a very narrow use case for these CPUs but one will try to look at what they make more sense for is production and until does advertise that as well but just like Andy did with 1800 X we have to call out when a company marks a CPU as being gaming targeted and it doesn't need to actually be used for a gaming machine because you could either get better performance overall or better price to performance with a lower end CPU even from Intel itself so they are kind of fighting their own reputation here in the gaming market but in production it'll be a different story and to go through a few more specs the cheapest 44 Lane CPU on offer is the AI 970 900 X which runs a three point three to four point five gigahertz clock depending on turbo state with the most common gaming frequency sitting nearer to four point three gigahertz the 7900 X is a ten core twenty thread CPU with 44 PCIe gen3 lanes I don't want thousand dollar price tag so some of these prices overall are certainly better than intel's previous x line that's a good thing what we would have really liked to see though is for intel to double down where they're good right now which would be the 77 hard k which is really still the best for gaming and then try and compete more where they're losing ground rapidly that would be in the i5 territory where we've already said an hour our five review of the 1600 x that it really makes a whole lot more sense to buy something like a 1600 for i-5 level gaming these days it's just better value right now and it's really not that far be hide the i7 is a different story it's extra for threads do health in the games where the i5 falls behind and so it does well where am these struggles a bit more where we really need to see intel compete though is that i5 market there's nothing here for you in that market right now is on a cable a KX refresh of the 7600 K and that's not going to do them a lot of favors and then doubling down on i7s in the enthusiast 300h dollar price point rather than going really hard on the h EDT stuff that said they'll probably be high performers in a EDT but they're also high cost a thousand of two thousand dollars so that's what we're looking at for today there will be some pre included CLC solutions with some of these things that we'll talk about more in the future as we learn more from ASA tech who is the supplier of those CL CS that ship stock with the higher end devices but we don't know a whole lot about them now then the name is TS 13x and it's a 120-millimeter solution that's about it so that's all for this until news item as always subscribe for more because we'll be at Computex all week we're here in taipei now and you can find all of our trade show coverage on the channel on the website gamers next to sign up for the articles doesn't come out or go to patreon.com/scishow cameras now because that was that directly thank you for watching I'll see you all next time you