Intel i7-7700K Performance Review ‘Kaby Lake’ at its finest

System Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Google Octane 2.0

Mozilla Kraken

Cinebench R15

POVRay

X265 Bench

WinRAR Compression

CNTK DNN

Monte Carlo Financial Analysis

Gaming Compilation

In order to truly test the capabilities over its predecessor we’ve tested games at a 1080P resolution with a GTX 1080 to ensure that the GPU is not the limiting factor.

In reality there’s very little difference between the two. The fact that there literally are no internal changes, aside from an improved process, means that only the higher clockspeed plays an actual role in increased performance. IPC is generally the same, and so we don’t see much of an advantage in pure performance at all. Simply overclocking your existing i7-6700K on the desktop will yield similar results.

Conclusion

The benefits of Kaby Lake aren’t necessarily on the Desktop. The new technologies that they have baked into the release are not necessarily suited to making performance that much greater outside of better power management and lower power usage. That, which is being explored in-depth in a different article, doesn’t appear to be drastic either. Kaby Lake isn’t exactly innovative and it doesn’t even really represent a historic tick cycle. Though Cannon Lake is looking even more enticing, Kaby Lake and the i7-7700K is what happens when a company doesn’t try anymore.

That said, the ability to cycle up faster and do work even more quickly does have benefits for laptops and tablets. We’ve seen battery life improvements and general performance increases as a result of those innovations. They just don’t mean as much on a desktop. Especially when you can simply overclock your existing Skylake to match the base performance of the i7-7700K. The process change does theoretically allow for even more overhead, which we’ll explore in the other article. Overall it isn’t a good upgrade and unless you absolutely need the benefits of new technologies, Optane specifically, Kaby Lake is not worth it. It’s Skylake+. The only reason to consider the i7-7700K is when upgrading from something other than Skylake, if only because it’s less expensive than the latter.