Gadgetory

it's been a month now since Intel's Core x-range arrived and I'm not really sure how to describe how Intel's the latest and greatest platform has been received let's just keep it simple and say there have been mixed feelings strong mixed feelings anyway I'm sure you lot are up to speed so I won't go over all the details again in this video instead I'll get right to the point recently I created a 30 game test comparing the core i7 7 100x that's the new 6 core sky like X part against the tried-and-true core i7 7700 K quad core quite shockingly with 7700 K blasted the 700 X by 13% margin overall and it was often up to and Beyond 20% faster were still the 78 her ex didn't show any strength either there wasn't a single game where it beat the 77 ok by anything more than the margin of error concluding that video I put the massive deficit down to the restructured cache design of the sky like ex architecture but I noted it could also be the new mesh design like AMD's infinity fabric Intel's mesh is a more efficient means of connecting many calls together and when compared to the ring bus method previously used it does save a lot of die space there are some possible drawbacks though to the mesh design and I'll discuss those a bit later in the video the main focus of this video though will be overclocking the mesh by default the mesh runs at the young core speed which is in the region of 1.8 to 2.4 gigahertz a few viewers claimed than in order to extract the most performance out of the 700 X I needed to overclock the mesh some even claims that pushing the mesh from 2.4 gigahertz to 3 gigahertz would see the 700 X deliver 77 FK like gaming performance prior to the video I had actually tried increasing the mesh to 2.8 gigahertz and notice maybe a 1 to 2 FPS increase given that that's within the margin of error what's really hard to say if the overclocked I was helping at all so here we are the mesh ratio has been increased to 30 times giving us a frequency of 3 gigahertz as you can see not much to report here when testing with rise of the Tomb Raider this is the same 1 to 2 FPS I saw at 2.0 Keuka Hertz in my previous tests even with the CPU clocked at 4.7 gigahertz we see little improvement performance still rather than call the day and close the book on the measure overclocking I decided to quickly check out a few more games the next obvious stop for me was battlefield one and here we did see up to a four percent performance increase when comparing the average framerate at the stop clock speeds it's hardly redefined the 700 X but it has helped close the gap between it and the 77 ROK in this title ok so what about a game where the 7800 X got completely creamed by the quad-core such a game would be civilization 6 and here we see the mesh does boost the minimum frame rate for the stock configuration by an impressive 10% ok now we're starting to get somewhere granted even with the mesh overclock the 700 X is still 15% slower than 77 ok it's an improvement nonetheless though that said though once the CPU cores are overclocked to 4.7 G cuts we see that the mesh overclocked now makes a little to no difference the gains in Far Cry primal another game where the 700 X gets completely trampled by the smaller chip pretty miserable at best the mesh overclocked Nets up to 5% more performance though for the most part the gains were more around the 3% region Grand Theft Auto 5 is another game where the SI 100x looked very weak in comparison to the 77 or okay and here the mesh overclocked does Bruce performance by 6 percent at the stock core clock speeds anyway once we overclock the cause and run them at 4.7 Giga Hertz the measure of a clock now first performance by just 2% which again is within the margin of error wrapping things up I gave hitman a shot and the DirectX 12 title delivers similar results to what we've seen already the minimum frame rate for example is improved by a decent 7% margin at the stock core clock speeds but only 3% once the calls are overclocked to 4.7 gigahertz so I think we can conclude that the mesh overclocking does help maybe not just as much summer making out the game thing to be much less impressive once you overclock the actual cause themselves which was surprising I honestly thought it'd be the other way around that would make more sense to me anyway but that wasn't what I found I should note that with the mesh at three gigahertz I did run into the odd game crash and twice the system booted up and couldn't find the SSD increasing the mesh voltage helped stabilize the system a bit but it didn't completely solve all the problems I was having with the 700 on occasions there was still the odd hiccup I would also like to just point out that I have tried the mesh overclock on the asrock X 299 Tai Chi as well as the gigabyte x2 9 horas gaming 3 both provided the same results I've also purchased the Isuzu prime x2 99a and that will be arriving later in the week so I'll see how that board goes as well before wrapping this video up I'm just going to talk a little bit about Intel smash design and Express a few of my own thoughts right so for a long time now Intel has been using the ring buffs method a low latency high bandwidth solution the ring bus was introduced with the Nehalem architecture those impressive LGA 1366 CPUs released all the way back in 2008 and this in my opinion is when Intel really started to hit full stride in those quad-core parts the ring bus made perfect sense and enabled a highly efficient design however as call caps for the server parts using the same basic architecture exceeded 12 cores the ring bus method started to take up a lot of room and the benefits thing with the lower core count parts no longer existed the high coil count models ended up with multiple rings which ultimately led to a very complicated design aware of this issue in designing Zen AMD came up with the CCX module design which uses what they call infinity fabric to connect the multiple CCX modules and this gave AMD a scalability advantage over intel's ring bus architecture therefore it was clean until required a similar method and therefore they developed the mesh architecture Intel claims that the mesh design sees a negligible latency difference when compared to the ring bus and this might be true for the really high coil count CPUs however for the six core eight core and probably even the ten core part based on what I've seen so far the ring bus was a much more efficient design of course there have been some other major changes to the skyline hex architecture so it's really difficult to say for sure if this is just the mesh design that's responsible for the weaker-than-expected gaming performance in any case what we're now seeing is much similar performance between processors such as the core 7/7 her ex and the horizon 5 1600 which you will soon see in Friday's video not to give away too much and both of those processes just mentioned are of course six core parts having said all that Intel still does have an IPC advantage but it's nowhere near like what we saw in comparing the core i7 7200 okay to say the risin 5 1500 X for example at the same clock speeds right now I believe that while the mesh design might work well for high coil count CPUs those exceeding 12 cores or thereabout it doesn't really work that well for lower core count CPUs and this is why we're seeing the 7700 K with its ring bus design absolutely blasting the 7800 X until games really require more than say 8 threads the superior resources of the semi 800 X won't be able to offset the increased latency of the mesh design anyway this is just a theory from a guy who spends way too much time running benchmarks even more time exporting crash from Excel what I can tell you is that overclocking the mesh will help just probably not as much as you'd like and well that's where I'm going to leave this one at least for now anyway coming up on the channel very soon as in the next few days I'll have a big 30 game benchmark comparison between the 707 or K and the horizon 5 1600 and without even trying to hype that one I can tell you the results are extremely interesting I'm your host Steve see again soon guys