Overall, the CPU is the best performer in the high-end segment and we are really excited to see how the competition acts with the release of Ryzen right on the horizon. If you already have a 4790K or a 6700K, it’s best to skip this one and wait for Cannonlake.
It seems as if only yesterday we were looking into the launch of the Intel Skylake series of CPUs. However, that isn’t the case, Skylake happened in August 2015, a good year and a half back. This iteration took less time and isn’t a complete redesign to begin with. Kabylake departs from the classic Tick-Tock cadence cycle that Intel had been following for so long. Instead, Intel Kabylake isn’t a tick or a tock. It’s an ‘optimize.’ So Intel is basically ironing out whatever issues they’d found in Skylake and improving certain vital areas as we’ll come to see. What this means, is that you shouldn’t expect tremendous performance gains from Kabylake across the board. There have been quite a few ridiculous overclocking gains reported with the 7700K with one recent record having hit 7.2 GHz with liquid helium.
Based on the 14nm FinFET process node, Kabylake’s key improvements are focused around the new IGP which now has full hardware VP9/HEVC decoding capabilities. All of these improvements are going towards Intel’s Cannonlake architecture which is slated for launch later this year. Cannonlake should ideally be a die shrink to 10nm but with AMD’s Ryzen on the horizon, we’re quite eager to see how Intel will respond. With barely a month for AMD’s offerings to be launched, we’ve started hearing of new SKUs being prepped by Intel. The Core i7 7740K and the Core i5 7640K are supposedly being prepped for launch just around AMD’s Ryzen launch. This is all still not confirmed but is quite likely true.
Lately, there have been rumours that Intel might opt for yet another optimisation step in the form of Coffee Lake before moving onto Cannonlake, Coffee Lake flagship SKU is also expected to be 6-core. Aside from the IGP, Kabylake processors bring with it, a few key changes to the platform, including the new 200 series Union Point chipset among others. Support for Intel Optane seems to be one of the highlights of the newer 200-series chipsets.
Kabylake is how Intel hopes to materialise what it calls the “Immersive Internet”. The improved IGP on Kabylake goes a long way towards making this a possibility. And that’s by making 4K content consumption easier, helping bring popular Esports titles to each and every one along with VR and 360-degree video playback.
We’ve already mentioned Intel Optane and the IGP as the improvements with Kabylake that stand out the most. Here are the rest.
With performance, the 7700K excels at a few tests but overall, the increment isn’t that impressive. In our WinRAR test against the 6700K, the 7700K had a reduction of about 0.6 seconds which amounted to slightly above 1 percent which is within the error margin. Even in CineBench the score difference was just 2 units in favour of the 7700K. However, when you move towards utilising the improved IGP you see a marked difference. Transcoding a 4K video had an improvement of about 9.8 percent and gaming in GTA V was equally decent. On the 6700K with no discrete graphics card connected, we managed to get 45 FPS and on the 7700K that went up to 54 FPS. We tried overclocking the CPU on air but were only able to complete benchmarks at 4.8 GHz. Taking it up any further would cause the CPU to throttle.
Clock Speed - 4.2 GHz,
Turbo frequency - 4.5 GHz,
Cores/Threads - 4/8,
Lithography - 14nm,
TDP - 91W,
IGP - Intel HD 630,
IGP Frequency - 350 MHz,
IGP Max Freq. - 1.15 GHz.
CPU - Intel Core i7 6700K / Core i7 7700K
Motherboards - GIGABYTE AORUS Z270X GAMING 9
GIGABYTE AORUS Z270X GAMING 7
ASUS MAXIMUS IX FORMULA
MSI Z270 Gaming M7
RAM - G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 MHz (8GBx4) (Clocked at 2400 MHz for the review)
SSD - 2x SanDisk Extreme II 240 GB RAID 0
HDD - Seagate IronWolf 10TB
CPU Cooler - Noctua NH-D15
PSU - Corsair HX1050
Cabinet - Thermaltake Core V51
Price: | ₹31000 |
Release Date: | 09 Feb 2017 |
Market Status: | Launched |
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