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Anandtech reviews the new Intel i5 7600k & i7 7700k
- Thread starter Vanillalite
- Start date
Sax Russel
Banned
Pretty much the same thing a few other people have said... maybe next year *pats 2500k gently
Sword Of Doom
Member
I saved $100 going with a 6700k+motherboard and I think it was the right decision for me.
IcyRhythms
Member
They're are only good if you're building a new PC/getting into PC gaming for the first time. Intel lacks competition and this is the result.
loganclaws
Plane Escape Torment
This is very true unfortunately.
The Bookerman
Member
I kinda regret getting a 6600k instead of a 6700k now.
CarbonFire
Member
Ugh please AMD. Give me a reason to upgrade my 3570k.
Intel's likely not going to have anything interesting for gaming at least until late 2018/early 2019 at this rate, since Coffee lake is still 14nm. Great time to give AMD some business and make this a two horse race again.
Intel's likely not going to have anything interesting for gaming at least until late 2018/early 2019 at this rate, since Coffee lake is still 14nm. Great time to give AMD some business and make this a two horse race again.
The CPU market is pretty established for the Silicon era in terms of single thread performance. AMD's Zen only makes it slightly more interesting because we can get more reasonably performing cores for cheaper.
In terms of software development, most modern compilers have moved to robust utilization of scaling multiple threads. For C++ compilation you can bypass the limitations of per core performance and core count by using distributed compilation with tools like Incredibuild or open source variants. So you balance per core performance with core count and distribution, typically highest demanding compilations would go for dual socket E5s at the 6-10 core count per proc (especially if you've got some legacy single threaded portions of your development process) or if you have a more scalable lower intensity application you'll go for the E7 procs with 20+ cores per proc.
For home use, really I would only benefit from more than 4 cores for Lightroom post-processing and gaming. Gaming is only beginning to leverage more than 4 cores. I thought it would have happened earlier due to Xbox One and PS4, but the AMD 8 core chip they're using is so damn weak that my i7 Ivy at 4.6 GHz can run 8 threads faster than 8 logical Xbox/PS4 APU threads.
Intel is going to mix materials with Silicon to get a few more die shrinks, but beyond that there's a race to find the replacement for silicon. I haven't kept up with the Graphene/Stanene research but I think there's a lot of roadblocks getting that to work. Would be nice, we'd gradually bump up to nearly 1 THz.
In terms of software development, most modern compilers have moved to robust utilization of scaling multiple threads. For C++ compilation you can bypass the limitations of per core performance and core count by using distributed compilation with tools like Incredibuild or open source variants. So you balance per core performance with core count and distribution, typically highest demanding compilations would go for dual socket E5s at the 6-10 core count per proc (especially if you've got some legacy single threaded portions of your development process) or if you have a more scalable lower intensity application you'll go for the E7 procs with 20+ cores per proc.
For home use, really I would only benefit from more than 4 cores for Lightroom post-processing and gaming. Gaming is only beginning to leverage more than 4 cores. I thought it would have happened earlier due to Xbox One and PS4, but the AMD 8 core chip they're using is so damn weak that my i7 Ivy at 4.6 GHz can run 8 threads faster than 8 logical Xbox/PS4 APU threads.
Intel is going to mix materials with Silicon to get a few more die shrinks, but beyond that there's a race to find the replacement for silicon. I haven't kept up with the Graphene/Stanene research but I think there's a lot of roadblocks getting that to work. Would be nice, we'd gradually bump up to nearly 1 THz.
Our best hope is probably something like Samsung. Intel's direction is to put SSD/RAM into a new memory technology so basically a PC/laptop is an SoC. That's very disruptive of Samsung's memory market, and they've known this has been coming for a few years now so hopefully they're researching next gen materials for CPU compute.
I updated from an i7-2600k@stock to an i7-5930K@4.6Ghz early this year. I can't say I notice much difference that can't be attributed to upgrading to a regular SSD to an M.2 PiE SSD for the OS installation and 2666Mhz quad-channel DDR4 64GB of RAM. But I started heavy work on virtual machines only after the upgrade.
Makoto-Yuki
Banned
wow ivy bridge and even sandybridge are still holding up. haswell is still going strong. my 6700K will last a good while then. the earliest i will consider upgrading is Icelake. still though i want to see AMD shake things up and light a fire under intel. hopefully we can move on from 4c/8t cpu's and make 6/12 or 8/16 the standard while also making the prices reasonable. i understand that shrinking down to <10nm is tough because physics but there is no reason they can't stick more cores in at the least. intel has go too complacent. AMD would also do well to do the same to nvidia on the GPU side. they are getting away with ridiculous prices for the 1000 series cards.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I miss the days of slap me in the ass generational performance leaps.
DJ_Lae
Member
Haha, that's me - I just bought a 1070 to go with my 3570K (I had a 7970).
However, I do plan on getting a 7700K at some point in the next few months, whenever a decent deal comes along. I already have a case and some other random stuff picked out, just waiting on the CPU and motherboard.
Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
Well, firstly - 7700K is garbage and I see absolutely no reason to buy it. My 4790K works just fine and basically at the same level in terms of gaming stuff. Hell, even much older stuff works just fine. Secondly, I'm not going to tell to the people what they should and should not buy, who am I to tell them what to do? They have their own heads at their shoulders which can think for themselves. And lastly, my point is - not everyone can afford, even people with good income, and I know quite a few of them myself so... just saying.
Maybe because I own high-end enthusiast CPU and rig myself? The fact of the matter is, I just can't justify buying monitors or TVs for 500$ cuz it's not affordable enough even though I can afford buying high-end rig. It's more like a matter of justification.
This is totally not the case here.
I finally upgraded to a 4790k late last year, and I'm happy to see nothing that makes me regret that decision here. I think the 4790k is going to become the mainstream upgrade point for gaming for the next few CPU generations at least. Folks that are coming off the 2500k might as well make the jump to the 6700k if they want to spend the money on new RAM, but otherwise the 4790k is the clear budget winner.
Tarin02543
Member
Same, I'll replace my i7-3770 once something fresh and interesting is announced by Intel.
I wonder when we might get 128/256/512bit architecture computers? I mean, our computers can't stay 64 bit for the next 10 years?
Makoto-Yuki
Banned
the next set of CPU's will be less impressive right? cannonlake will be 10nm but i think they will be mostly aimed towards laptops. the next set of desktop cpu's will be Coffeelake which will add 6 core or maybe 8 core cpu's but will still be at 14nm. Icelake will be the first 10nm desktop cpu's and they might not be out until late 2018 or early 2019.
I think justification is still partly derived from personal buying power.
looks like the 4790 in the box stays a bit longer. not sure what they were trying to do with this package. almost get the message that they don't have to try because there isn't any competition. hoping there is some decent price drops on the older set to put together some additional systems.
we are no where near even close to quantum computing for consumers lol
and probably not in 20 years
and it probably wont even be better than traditionnal CPUs for everyday usage (including gaming)
NumberThree
Member
There's absolutely no need for architectures to go beyond 64 bits in the foreseeable future.
Yappadappadu
Member
I'm both surprised and disappointed that all(?) of those new Z270 boards only do HDMI 1.4b.
This is 2017 and HDMI 2.0(a) has been a standard for years. Annoying since I thought that you could use those CPUs/Mainboards to build a Kodi HTPC for a UHD TV. So after all an additional GPU (GTX 1050 etc.) ist still required.
Don't. I don't think it is worth the extra 100 or something that it cost when I was buying my 6600K. In games I have yet to see an i7 make any real difference over an i5.
Frostbite and Ubisoft games will show the difference.
Theonik
Member
Currently I have a spare 2500K system stacked away somewhere and a 6700K on my main system this might be nice as a home server or media PC probably going to build a 7700 system for either purpose tbh. Power efficiency is quite important for me in the former case, integrated GPU on the 2500K is not good enough for the later so this is somewhat more complicated than it should be.
The significantly faster speedstep technology is also useful. Time from idle to full turbo is down to 30ms vs 300ms. This isn't meant to be a very interesting iteration. Intel's new cycle is shrink-architecture-tweeks this is a tweak generation of chips. Next release will be more exciting but if you want major improvements you will wait 2 gens. Though we might get mainstream 6-core chips next year.
Mainstream 6 core CPUs are expected to arrive in 2018 with Cannonlake. 8 core seems unlikely.
Moving from a 4c/4t i5-3570K to a 6c/12t i7 would probably be a big jump in performance though, so long as your applications can use the additional cores/threads.
With Kaby Lake bringing zero IPC improvements, I'm excited for Skylake-X/EP towards the end of this year.
That will be the first 8-core CPU from Intel with the same IPC as the current mainstream CPU, so you won't be sacrificing IPC for cores like you've had to in the past.
It's still not going to clock as high due to having those extra cores though; 5GHz isn't going to happen.
I don't think there's a pressing need to move beyond 64-bit.
The move from 32-bit to 64-bit was largely because we had been limited to 4,294,967,296 bytes (2^32) or around 4.3GB of addressable memory - with around 3GB made available to users.
64-bit can address 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes (2^64) or around 18.4 exabytes of memory. We're not going to be hitting those limits any time soon.
Intel CPUs since Haswell have also had support for 256-bit AVX2 instructions, and Skylake-X/EP will be adding AVX-512 support.
It's still the fastest quad-core CPU you can buy today.
It just doesn't improve IPC from the previous generation in any way, though it does clock higher.
It's definitely not "garbage" - it's just not a compelling upgrade if you already have a 6700K.
I'm starting to think the same.
I was planning on picking up a 7700K now that they're available but when I actually add up the cost of everything, it's looking like a $1000 upgrade.
If I'm going to be spending that much, I'm thinking I'd rather just wait and do a complete system build later in the year when the new HEDT parts ship - or possibly Ryzen depending on how that tests against a 6900K.
Really fucking annoying as someone who spent admittedly way too much money on a 4k monitor mainly for video editing, I can't watch 4k video. I'm excited that there's finally a workaround sort of... But to "upgrade" to this CPU is at best just throwing money away on what's essentially a very expensive "Netflix plus" subscription of sorts.
Oh and itd most likely be worse than my current CPU for video editing which is my actual job.
Fuck DRM, they're making it so fucking infuriatingly hard for anyone who wants to have 4k content to get 4k content. It's not like this is actually preventing people from ripping 4k streams, it's happening anyway.
Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
By looking at those benchmarks I can only lmao. If this CPU is better at anything, it's integrated GPU which is indeed much better than previous generation. But um... who cares about integrated GPUs? I honestly can't think of a one single reason as to why these enthusiast level CPUs need to have integrated GPUs. I mean, when it comes to home use, gaming and resource-hungry programs.
Games don't care all that much. You can giant 5-7 FPS at best when you OC your CPU and in my eyes it's simply not worth it.
As well as 3770K and 4770/90K. Zero reason to upgrade.
SapientWolf
Trucker Sexologist
It's a 980.
That depends on our personal use case. For enthusiast gaming, DDR4 bandwidth alone can bring performance improvements in new games today.
If we take a gander at BF1 performance discussions, we see some people having their 3770K sweating under high pop BF1 MP.
Then there are VR and 144hz people who will use every CPU grunt they can find, with single-core priority.
If you were looking at Newegg's prices, it was on sale. 50$ off. We at 529 officially. Sucks hardcore.
For right now... still rocking that 950... at base clocks. *cries*
Anandtech's gaming benchmarks are worthless, as I've already explained.
Minimum framerates, 4770K vs 6700K:
- 20 FPS in Total War Warhammer
- 24 FPS in DOOM (OpenGL)
- 23 FPS in Rise of the Tomb Raider
- 19 FPS in The Division
- 25 FPS in Shadow Warrior 2
Their benchmark for ABZU puts minimum framerate on a 2500K at 70 FPS, while the game was dropping to the mid-40s at times on my PC - and I stopped playing it as a result.
If you use those numbers as a relative metric where ABZU is 98 FPS on a 6700K and 70 FPS on a 2500K, a 6700K is about 40% faster in that game.
So in the places where I saw it drop to 45 FPS, it should only drop to 63 FPS on a 6700K.
In the same benchmark a 4770K is 30% faster than a 2500K, which would mean that it's dropping below 60, to 58 FPS.
Since I don't have a variable refresh rate monitor, I need games to never drop below 60 FPS. That makes a fast CPU is absolutely essential, and the 4770K would not be enough.
5 FPS can make all the difference if it means staying above 60 FPS instead of dropping below it on a fixed refresh rate display.
Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
Well, I guess it depends on personal needs.
Personaly, I don't care about FPS above 60, so as long as my 4790K can provide this in 95% of games, I just don't care about upgrading to any other and "much more powerful" CPU. Plus, even if I could care about FPS above 60, I need to have a decent monitor with 120 Hz at least and these are no where near as affordable as the ones with 60 Hz. So, it's not like you can buy just the new CPU to get above 60 FPS, you also need to buy 120 Hz monitor as well and this alone can cost you ~1000$. There's no way in hell I can justify this for myself. And that's not even counting new mobo and RAM.
No-one is trying to convince you to buy one.
However you're telling people that it's "garbage" and not worth buying because you can't justify the cost of upgrading to one yourself.
When I add up the cost of upgrading from my 2500K to a 7700K with top-tier DDR4 RAM and a motherboard to support it, I'm now thinking that I might try and hold on to my 2500K until Ryzen is here.
I thought I would be buying one the second they were available until I saw the total cost of that upgrade because I've been noticing the 2500K holding back my GPU in more and more games recently.
But I'm not trying to tell people that it's a garbage product that no-one should buy just because I'm not sure that I'll be buying one myself.
Waiting for Ryzen and then making a decision once all the information is available seems like the smart thing for anyone to do right now if they have the option to wait.
But if you want/need a system now, a 7700K system is the best mainstream option available.
I would be very surprised if Ryzen competes with the 7700K in demanding games that only use up to four CPU cores - which is still the majority.
However overall system performance if you do a lot of multitasking or use other CPU-intensive applications, and looking to newer games which move beyond four threads, should tip the balance in favor of the 8-core chip.
I do find it concerning to see how poor the gaming benchmarks for the 7700K have been on many sites though, because tests like the ones Anandtech ran are not going to provide useful data for Ryzen either.
Should be fine soon. Skylake also benched worse than Broadwell initially until Intel/MS fixed some bug.
Serious Sam
Member
Digital Foundry just upped their review for 7600K and they did extensive gaming comparisons to 2500K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYb0y8LNAVI (maybe worthy of dedicated thread?)
I'm not sure why people still are under impression that 2500K is as good as new CPUs, especially people who are pairing 1070 and 1080 with 2500K. That's just crazy and these GPUs are getting severely bottle-necked by 2500K.
I'm not sure why people still are under impression that 2500K is as good as new CPUs, especially people who are pairing 1070 and 1080 with 2500K. That's just crazy and these GPUs are getting severely bottle-necked by 2500K.
Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
And I'm not saying that someone is.
You totally missed the point. The only people who can benifit a lot, not a little bit here and there or fair amount, but a lot from this CPU is the ones with 1156 CPUs or the 2ХХХ series. Everyone else will be just fine. Hell, even OC'ed i7 2600K is more that capable right now and still relevant for most games. You're live the world where not only big budget and eye blowing games are available people.
As for AMD... to early to tell right now but, Ryzen is sure does look very interesting but I don't see myself upgrading to AMD paltform anytime soon. They need to beat Intel just like they did 10 or so years ago with the first FX CPU's which back then was the absolute best for gaming. Then and only then I will consider to jump on AMD train again.
motherxwolf
Member
Still rocking a i7 3770k, upgraded my GPU to a gtx1070 and all my games are still running at 100+ fps
billythemule
Member
I wish someone could benchmark Starcraft 2 Legacy of the Void. It's one of those games that only utilize 2 cores during gameplay so campaign and team games really suffer in fps even with a good CPU. I want to see the jump from 3770K to 7700K.
Same here, would love to see some benches for the game
mario_O
Member
Digital Foundry just upped their review for 7600K and they did extensive gaming comparisons to 2500K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYb0y8LNAVI (maybe worthy of dedicated thread?)
I'm not sure why people still are under impression that 2500K is as good as new CPUs, especially people who are pairing 1070 and 1080 with 2500K. That's just crazy and these GPUs are getting severely bottle-necked by 2500K.
Many people are happy with 60fps. Going from 85 to 110 fps makes no difference.