Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed today I'm finally checking out Intel's new skylake X CPUs for those of you unaware during the Computex 2017 trade show which took place earlier this month Intel announced their upcoming core x-series comprising of not three CPUs not four but rather nine the biggest range of high-end desktop processors intel has ever announced so why is Intel gone from four CPUs with Ford rally covering the six eight and ten core variants to nine CPUs covering anywhere from 4 to 18 cause the answer is simple after years without competition Intel finally had some and some serious competition at that AMD Verizon 7 and Rison 5 CPUs have already mix things up quite a bit and put Intel's more mainstream offerings under fire AMD then put Intel on notice when they announced the upcoming high-end desktop series dubbed thread Ripper which would offer up to a massive 16 core 32 thread part and it's expected to cost considerably less than Intel's 10 called Broadway Lee CPU speaking of Broadway Lee the sting from that series is still fresh in my mind though 10 core 69 50 X came in at insane $1700 us well the eight core sixty nine hundred K wasn't much better at one thousand and fifty dollars u.s. those seeking a 6-quart Intel CPU had to cough up at least four hundred thirty dollars for the 6800 K but in doing so sorry pretty hefty downgrade in PCI Elaine's from 40 to just 28 as it stood AMD's rise in seven series is making a mockery of Broadway Lee so Intel needed to combat the situation sooner rather than later and with an even more serious threat on the horizon they decided to act and rush out skylake X the question being in a world where the risin 7 1700 exists for just 310 dollars can until get away charging roughly twice that for their 8 core CPU this is exactly what they plan to do with the core i7 78 20x higher up the food chain we have the core I 9 7900 X the cheapest of the new core o 9 CPUs at just $1000 it's the cheapest 10 core CPU we've ever seen from Intel but is it cheap enough then you six core why 778 100x model has dropped down to a slightly more affordable $390 us but that still prices that well above the 8 core horizon 7 1700 Intel's also going to release a pair of quad-core parts based on the KB like X architecture in what is an utterly baffling move those parts will be the core i7 7740 X and the core i5 7640 X for this review though I won't be looking at these models we'll save them for a future feature thus far I've mentioned five of the nine new Intel Core xep I use the other four being me twelve fourteen sixteen and eighteen core models though they won't be available on June 26 rather Intel suggests they will be released much later in the year anyway for this video I'm not going to go too heavily into the details on the new processes all intel's new architecture we've sort of already gone over the specifications and information released at competence and since we are quite late to the party here all this information has been released by other sources so for now we're focused on the lower core count sky like X chips the core o 970 100x core i7 78 20x and core i7 7800 X here we can see how each of the three new CPU is compared and apart from the core count and of course price the key thing to note here are the available PCIe lanes for the full forty four lanes consumers must invest no less than $1000 meanwhile the $600 and $390 parts offer only 28 lanes the same amount as last season 6800 K if we compare the core oh nine 7100 X to the previous generation ten core part it looks very impressive you get the same core in thread count while paying a little over 40% less you also get a few more PCIe lanes and of course upgraded CPU architecture then when compared to 2014 flagship core i7 5960 X you get more cores and a higher operating frequency for the same price of course as I mentioned a lot has changed in the last three months as a result the CPU landscape looks very different and with the arrival of AMD's thread Ripper just around the corner things are set to change even more as I said thread Ripper will pack up to 16 cores and 32 threads and is expected to cost no more than the core o 970 900 X that's at official pricing information is yet to be released what we do know is a thread Ripper platform will offer an incredible 64 PCIe lanes while the CPUs will pack a mammoth 32 megabytes of level 3 cache although we can't compare the new skylake X CPUs to thread Ripper we can see how they compare to amy's existing risin 7 and risin 5 parts so let's do that previously with Broadway Lee processes such as the 69 50 X and 69 or ok we were stuck at a memory speed of about 20 666 the skylake EX models happily accepted the 3600 extreme memory profile of our g.skill Triton's at our GB 32 gig memory kit that said though we decided to test at 3200 and we thought this was probably a better memory speed until we test how many memory modules XJ 99 motherboards and Korac CPUs can hit this frequency anyway running the memory at ddr4 through 200 resulted in a massive bandwidth of 63 gigabytes per second for the core o 9 7 100x the 6 core 700 X also achieved roughly 60 gigabytes of throughput as well this means 470 100x enjoyed around an 18% boost in memory bandwidth compared to the previous generation 10 core 69 50x AMD's Rison 7-series impressed in the Cinebench r15 multi-threaded test and as you can see the 8 core CPU puts down the 69 50 X with relative ease in fact the 1800 X isn't a great deal slower than the 10 core 69 50 X largely thanks to greater operating frequencies however the core i7 78 20 and its higher clock speeds make up for this enable to roughly match the 69 50 X while offering almost a 20% boost over the 1600 K the six core 7800 X also outscores the horizon 5 1600 X and beats it comfortably for the single thread test as well then finally we have the Big Daddy the core I nine 1700 X and it's amazing score of two thousand 201 points making it by far the most powerful desktop CP we've ever tested the single thread result is also very impressive matching the 7700 K those wanting to compress and decompress archives in a hurry take notice because again of has no desktop CPU as fast as the core I 9 1700 X at least at the moment the 70 100 X was 17 percent faster than 69 50 X in this test while it was also 19 percent faster than horizon 7 1800s when decompressing when it comes to compression the Rison CPUs aren't really that efficient result the seven 100x was 65% faster in this test the 69 50x has always been a beast in our Excel test taking just two seconds to complete the workload this isn't a memory sensitive test so that extra bandwidth doesn't really help the 700x pool miles ahead that said it still offers an 8 percent performance increase meanwhile the 78 20x match the risin 7 1800 X while the higher o'clock 70 our X managed to match the 1600 K the PC mark 10 essentials benchmarks aren't really designed to take advantage of core heavy CPUs rather they simulate common everyday ways people use their PC the workloads from this test that we're looking at cover web browsing and video conferencing as you can see the 77 ROK and its superior out-of-the-box clock speeds make it the best for web browsing tasks that said thanks to single and dual-core performance of the 7 100x it still does a very good job here as do the other sky like X CPUs the video conferencing test is a bit more core heavy as a result that's every 100x does pull ahead of the 7700 K by an 8 percent margin that said it is only able to match the risin 7 1800 X the productivity test group measures system performance with everyday office applications namely looking at spreadsheets and writing workloads again these aren't tasks that take advantage of workstation class hardware so quad-core such as the core i5 7600 K still do very well here the digital content creation test group reflects the demands of working with digital content and media the tests include photo editing rendering and visualization as well as video editing this graph shows the performance of the first two test groups a following graph will look at video editing performance as expected the coralline subbing our X does very well in these tests outscoring the Rison 7 1800 X by 33 percent margin for the rendering test though it was only 2% faster for the photo editing test which does use fewer cause lastly we have the PC mark 10 video editing results and again editing typically doesn't tax the CPU that much and few editing applications do a good job of utilizing more than a few calls we certainly see that here as the 7700 K was by far the fastest CPU tested the kora 9 1,700 X did do well here though but it wasn't that much faster than the 1,800 X Corona comes as a standalone benchmark it renders a 16-6 times and we report the time it takes to complete the task this application does love threads so the more the merrier and the quicker you'll be done and you can move on to something else as you can see the core I 970 100x took just 97 seconds which is less than half the time it took the core i7 77 okay it's also a 34 percent improvement over the 1,800 X meanwhile the 78 20x roughly matched the 69 50 X while the 70 100 ax was slower than the 60 nano okay but it did add out the rise in 5 1600 blender is a popular application it's often used for benchmarking CPU performance for both AMD and Intel the open source software is free to download and I've used version 2.7 8 and for the workload I've used aim DS rise and render file so yeah the new Intel CPUs are rendering rise in CPUs hmm anyway the core I nine 1700 X didn't seem to waste any time pondering the implications as I got the job done a blistering fast 18 seconds meanwhile the core i7 7e at 20 X took 21 and a half seconds and the 700 X was done in 26 seconds overall very strong performance from the new Intel CPUs for our handbrake test we take a 4k high quality video file and convert it from page to 64 down at 1080p using HEV C also known as h.265 the numbers are seeing here in the graph showing how many frames per second each CPU was able to transcode the video at the core I nine seven 100x is a beast managing 30 point seven frames a second making it 31 percent faster than 69 50x and 51 percent faster than the horizon 718 hundred x the higher clock speed of the seven 100x really helps here though the other memory bandwidth is equally important even the 78 20x is able to pull ahead of the 69 50x speeding it by 9 percent margin remember this is an Intel 8 core part versus their previous generation 10 core part so mighty impressive stuff meanwhile the six core 7800 X is able to virtually match the 69 50 X right so this is the test I care most about as I spend quite a bit of time each day rendering videos so the CPU that can save me the most time here is generally the one I'd go with for example the PC used to render this video packs a core i7 69 50 X and I had planned to probably replace it with thread Ripper soon that said the current version of Premiere Pro CC isn't that good at taking advantage of high coil count CPUs and as a result the 79 50 X is just 4% fast and the 69 50 X so it's a bit of a disappointing result the benchmark is career accelerated by gtx 980ti so keep that in mind that said though there aren't a huge amount of effects in my videos for the GPU to accelerate okay so I get these a hot gaming focus CPUs but if I skipped over the games entirely I can't imagine that would go down too well with many of you so I have picked four CPU intensive games but I think do a good job of utilizing as many calls as pretty much any game does these days that said most are best handled by six core 12 thread CPU that'll feel one for example still get to the highest frame rates on the core i7 77 oh okay still for a core heavy CPU the 1700 X does a very good job as does the 78 20x and 70 100 X Mark III was one of the few games that really took advantage of the horizon CPUs when they were first released allowing AMD who enjoy strong gains over the 77 rotate in this title however the game was quickly patched to become less CPU intensive perhaps better optimized is the word I'm not really sure but the direct result was lower CPU utilization while achieving slightly better frame rates here we see that the game still favors the higher clock 77 okay but also still requires more than four threads as the 7600 K is quite a long way down our graph hitman is a surprisingly CPU demanding title please know I've tested using DirectX 11 to avoid any issues in video GPU seem to have Witter Eisen when using DirectX 12 though I haven't revisited this recently anyway the skylake CPU is performed very well they'll against the 77 ok that's the fastest option here finally we have ashes the singularity the only game that can really take advantage of a 10 core CPU though at this point it's more of a synthetic benchmark than an actual game anyone plays still it does give us an idea of what future games might require though how far away that future is is anyone's guess up until now the new skylake x processors have looked mighty impressive and now they're starting to look mighty power-hungry for six cores semi 100x sucks down the same 193 watts as the horizon 7 1800 X I was hoping it would be closer to the 1600 X if I'm honest still though the 700x isn't really the issue here both the eight core and ten core models are considerably more power-hungry both push system consumption over 200 watts and that's significantly more than what the 69 50 X system consumed 226 watts is a huge amount of power draw in the excel test so let's move on and see what the power consumption figures will like forcing a bunch are 15 okay so these numbers are even worse quite a bit worse the reason for this being that the Cinebench r15 test is not just more intensive but it also runs for quite a bit longer so the chips heat up more and consume even more power for this test the 700 X while sucking out almost 260 watts whereas the 68 50x hit just 212 watts clearly those higher clock speeds come at a real cost although our coverage is late we still haven't had that much time to play around with the new core X CPUs just a few days in fact so I'm yet to spend much time overclocking in fact I've really only briefly taken a bit of a look with the 1700 X the results were mixed my chip only managed to stable 4.6 gigahertz overclock no matter how much voltage I throw at it I just couldn't stabilize anything higher the system would boot in the windows but it would end up blue screaming within a few moments of running any kind of stress test stability might improve in future BIOS updates or perhaps I just have a bit of a dud CPU looking around the internet seemed as most of stuck at 4.6 gigahertz like I am but others have managed to stabilize their system at 4.7 or 4 point 8 gigahertz however the frequency isn't my greatest concern right now using just 1.2 volts which is all I needed for a stable four point six could get hurt overclock on all caused the system consumption went from 259 watts which already deemed quite high to an insane 402 watts and yet that might not actually be the worst part the deal breaker is probably the operating temps cooling the seven 100 X was the corsair h 100 IV - and despite being a Premium 240 millimeter all-in-one liquid cooler temps skyrocketed the second CPU is placed under any kind of load hitting 90 degrees almost right off the bat before climbing further towards 100 degrees so unless you have an amazing cooler I'm not sure overclocking is really going to be worth it moving on from overclocking before I jump to the conclusion let's try and put the results just seen into perspective first up let's take a look at the price versus performance scatter plot for the Cinebench r15 multi-threaded results so ideally for all the price versus performance graphs that I'm about to show you what you want to see is the CPU as far right as possible and as well as possible the further right the better the performance the lower on the graph the cheaper the price as you can see the horizon 7 1800 X is rather far right and still quite low it is quite a bit better than the core i7 700 X in terms of value and remember the 1800 X itself isn't particularly good value sitting next to the horizon 7 1700 which sadly I didn't have time to add but I will for future videos obviously when compared to the 69 50x the new 1700 X is a massive step forward in terms of value offering a much greater performance at a much better price moving to the blender results we again see the horizon 7 1800 X and core i7 7800 X are quite similar in terms of value though again the pesky r7 1700 will mess things up for Intel here anyway looking just at Intel's lineup we see the 70 100 X is again a huge leap forward priced alongside the 1600 K it offers significantly better performance in this application the core I nine seven 100x proved to be a seriously significant upgrade over Broadwell II in our handbrake test for the same money Intel fans are essentially getting a 50% boost in performance and I believe the increased memory bandwidth really helps here this is something I will look into soon meanwhile the Rison 7 1800 x finds ourselves situated between the 700 X and the 78 20x in terms of price and performance the corona price versus performance figures look particularly impressive for the horizon 5 1600 X as it sneaks in just behind the core i7 7800 X at a much lower price meanwhile the 1800 X is much closer to the 78 20x while again coming in at a lower price for 7-zip I have only looked at the decompression results and AMD does much better here when compared to the compression testing that's what I feel most of you do significantly more decompression work than compression as you can see for decompression work the 1800 X is a lot better value to the core i7 1800 X and 78 20x processors looking at the PC mark rendering and visualisation figures we see that the core I nine see 100x is a massive upgrade / what Intel was previously offering that said for less than half the price the horizon 7 1800 X isn't that much slower and in terms of value it also gives us 78 20x and 70 100x a hard time lastly we have the Premiere Pro CC results and here the scatterplot looks quite a bit different to those seen previously as this application doesn't really do a good job of utilizing those high coil count CPUs even so the 7 100x does still offer a decent increase in value over the 1,600 K right so we've taken a pretty good look at the new core i-93 100x the core i7 78 20x and the core i7 7 800 X so the 10 core 8 core and 6 core parts will have to wait a bit later in the year before we can check out the more expensive 12 14 16 and 18 core models so for now let's not worry about them so what do I make of these new skylake X parts okay well firstly I think they are mighty impressive in terms of performance and I think we can probably all agree on that as it stands the core I 970 100 blows the socks off everything right now and the 7820 does a good job of making the previous generation 8 core CPU with a little sluggish the single and dual thread performance is also very impressive roughly on par with the best quad-core CPUs intel has on offer the only hiccup here is power consumption the skylake X parts consume between 20 to 40% more power than the equivalent Broadway leave parts so that's pretty brutal although I haven't delved too deep in the overclocking side of things just yet it's fair to say based on what I've seen so far that the massive increase in power consumption doesn't bode well for overclocking your typical go-to all-in-one liquid coolers aren't really cutting it a serious Do It Yourself solution will be required ok so performance is good power consumption is scary what about the price well compared to Broadwell either pricing is a lot less scary bang for your buck skylake X offers considerably more we've gone from a $1,700 us asking price for Intel's 10 core desktop CPU to $1000 and with that you're getting a much faster processor albeit a hotter and hungrier one bokura 970 100x is still a seriously expensive CPU there's no denying that but with no real competition when looking purely at it from a performance perspective intel probably can get away with charging what they are at least for now thread Ripper will likely change that in the near future but that's a story for another day let's talk eight core CPUs for a minute there isin seven 1800 s costs four hundred and six dollars u.s. right now but smart shoppers will up for a much cheaper three hundred and ten dollar 1700 model which can be overclocked to achieve the same performance the core i7 78 20 X and their hand comes in at a reasonable $600 US making it 30% more expensive in the 1800 X but almost twice the price of the 1700 looking at this in events are 15 multi-threaded performance the 78 20x is around 30% more powerful than the 1800 X so the price seems justified at least over that chip however moving a real-world applications the 78 20x was only like 10 percent faster overall so in terms of performance there really isn't that much in it the 78 20x does have the advantage of 28 PCI Express Lanes to just 16 lanes for the horizon 7 CPUs the limited PCIe lanes authorizing is something thread ripple will address in a rather big way shortly but if you need the extra PCI Express Lanes then the 7820 becomes the more obvious option for now basically though if you do care about value at all Rison 7 is the obvious option as a decent X 370 board starts at about a hundred and ten dollars us making the CPU motherboard combo just 420 dollars u.s. if you intelligently opt to the r7 1700 meanwhile the 78 20x and the cheapest X 299 motherboard will set you back about eight hundred and thirty dollars u.s. again basically twice the price for nowhere near twice the performance in any application meanwhile the six core 700 X roughly matches the 1800 X in terms of performance though they do trade blows depending on the application still if you throw the r7 1700 into the mix even Intel's most affordable skylake exceed PU is a tough sell that said even if money was no object that'll be nice I'd still have a tough time picking between the AMD horizon 7 CPUs and then you six core and 8 core skylake X CPUs pakora 9 7 100 X is a little clearer cut at will for now so yeah if money really is no object then the 700 X is the way to go the performance is exceptional you get loads of PCIe lanes overclocking is an option at least to a degree many degrees in fact and the X to 99 platform is superior to AMD's X 370 however even if thread report wasn't incoming if you look at this from a value perspective the 1700 X still makes no sense in a world where the Rison 7 CPUs exist that being the case as impressive as the performance of the 700 X is I don't recommend buying into Intel's latest platform at least not right now my advice is hold out see what AMD has to offer and then go from there until me very well have to adjust pricing that's going to do it for this one there's still plenty more testing to be done and I do have those kb like x cpus to confuse the heck outta me as well so that should be fun I'm your host Eve see you again soon guys