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ToolsWe started off the year with the establish of Intel ‘s 7th Generation “ Kaby Lake ” Core i7-7700K saw the launching of AMD ‘s Ryzen 7 in March ( with the flagship Ryzen 7 1800X ), and have been dealing with a steady stream of Ryzen 3 and Ryzen 5 chips always since. then came a pair of modern high-end enthusiast platforms : the Core X-Series on the Intel english, and AMD ‘s competing Ryzen Threadripper chips on Team Red ‘s side of the test bench .
so much has been going on in the kingdom of CPUs this year that it ‘s in truth beyond the setting of this review. You can get a adequate feel of where we ‘re at from checking the holocene reviews of the Intel Core i9-7900X and the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X, two of the highest-end consumer chips of 2017. If you ‘ve got some prison term to kill, check out those two reviews for some good backgrounder. ( Go ahead. We ‘ll wait. )
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Reading: Intel Core i7-7820X Review
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Welcome back ! now that you ‘re all caught up, we ‘re indisputable you ‘re at least deoxyadenosine monophosphate enthusiastic as we are to look at the Intel Core i7-7820X ( $ 599 MSRP ) and see where it fits in .
Meet the Core X-Series
This eight-core, 16-thread partially is another option in Intel ‘s expansive ( and still growing ) Core X-Series lineup, which ranges from the four-core Intel Core i5-7640X, right up to the 18-core Intel Core i9-7980XE. The model we ‘re looking at hera has a 3.6GHz base clock and the ability for two cores to ramp american samoa gamey as 4.5GHz using Intel ‘s Turbo Boost Max 3.0 sport. The Boost speed is meaning, as it ‘s a higher stock clock speed than any other Core X-Series chip, save for the Core i7-7900X, one step up the stack, which can besides hit 4.5GHz .
presently, nine chips make up the Core X-Series lineup, spanning across two computer architecture generations : 6th Generation Core ( dubbed “ Skylake ten ” in their iterations here ) and 7th Generation Core ( “ Kaby Lake X ” ). Rather than rattle off the wax list of chips and their basic specification, here ‘s a chart, direct from Intel …
The two 112-watt chips on the bottom are based on Kaby Lake architecture, while everything above the Core i7-7740X is based on the older Skylake silicon. In some ways, that ‘s not a huge conduct, since the two generations are very exchangeable. The primary deviation is that the newer Kaby Lake chips have hardware that makes them compatible with protect video-stream contented in 4K/HDR for stream and approaching services from the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and others. The lesser Kaby Lake X chips besides use dual-channel DDR4 memory, while the Skylake ten parts support quad-channel setups .
For the criminal record ( and in case you did n’t go read one of the former Core X-Series reviews for more context, tsk tsk ), all of these chips use the like LGA 2066 socket, and are compatible entirely with the X299 chipset. We are n’t going to detail the chipset, memory, and early considerations here, but alternatively target you to earlier reviews, notably the 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X, for that .
The boastful differentiator between these chips, away from the numbers of cores and threads, is the number of PCI Express lanes connected to the chip, which is crucial for installing bandwidth-hungry components such as graphics cards and PCI Express/NVMe solid-state drives ( SSDs ). The pair of four-core chips in the Core X-Series lineup ( the two Kaby Lake X chips at the penetrate of the graph above ) have just 16 lanes, which is the lapp as what you ‘ll find on mainstream offerings like the Core i7-7700K. The five Core i9 Skylake X chips that have 10 or more cores have 44 PCI Express lanes, while the Core X “ middle chips ” ( including the Core i7-7820X we ‘re looking at here, and the lesser Core i7-7800X ) have 28 lanes available from the CPU .
now, for most users, 28 lanes should more than suffice, including gamers and enthusiasts who may want to install a pair of high-end graphics cards in an SLI or CrossFireX shape, plus possibly a pair of fast PCI Express-based SSDs. Keep in heed, though, that the X299 chipset provides up to 24 lanes of its own for repositing, USB ports, and other bandwidth-hungry features. AMD ‘s competing Ryzen Threadripper platform, however, delivers 64 lanes of PCIe on all of its processors, including the recently announced, lower-end ( $ 549 ) Threadripper 1900X eight-core .
We ‘re honestly not sure how all but the most extreme ( and the wealthiest ) of users could actually make use of all those lanes. But if you have your reasons, you may want to go the AMD route. Just know that Threadripper motherboards ( which run on the new X399 chipset ) are undeniably expensive, starting at $ 340 when we wrote this. comparable Core X-Series motherboards ( running the X299 chipset ) start at a relatively “ cheap ” $ 210 .
actually, though, if a bargain is what you ‘re after, and you do n’t need more than eight cores and 20 available PCI Express lanes from the CPU, the Ryzen 7 1800X is going to be street fighter to beat. That chip sells for about $ 429 ( and we ‘ve seen it a low as $ 399 via some in-store retail specials ), with becoming, compatible B350 motherboards including an M.2 connection for quick storage and some LED bling, selling for ampere little as $ 69 when we wrote this .
In line, the also-eight-core Core i7-7820X we ‘re looking at here sells for about $ 599. ( B & H had it on sale for $ 586 when we were wrapping up this review. ) Paired with an entry-level X299 motherboard, you ‘re looking at about $ 800 for a chip-plus-motherboard for the eight-core Intel option, versus vitamin a small as $ 500 for the eight-core AMD option .
As we ‘re about to see in testing, the Intel Core i7-7820X performs better than the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X overall. But does it perform enough better to warrant vitamin a much as a 60 percentage increase in cost for the control panel and processor combined ? And how does Ryzen Threadripper and the 12-core, $ 799 Threadripper 1920X stack up against these two options ? For that, we ‘ll have to delve into testing and take a close look at performance. So lease ‘s do just that .
CPU-Specific Performance Testing
For our trial apparatus, we dropped the Core i7-7820X into the Asus Prime X299-Deluxe motherboard of our Core X-Series testbed personal computer, along with 32GB of Corsair memory running in a quad-channel setup. An Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition video tease handled display output for our CPU-specific tests, and a Kingston HyperX Savage was our SATA-interface bang drive. We stuck all those components into Deepcool ‘s GamerStorm Genome ROG Certified case, which includes a collected liquid cooler with a large three-fan radiator .
The Core i7-7820X sits between mainstream chips such as the four-core Core i7-7700K and AMD ‘s eight-core Ryzen 7 1800X, and pricier enthusiast-class silicon such as the 12-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X and the 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X. To round out our charts, we besides included numbers for the 16-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, a well as a couple of older, previous-generation Intel chips : the 10-core Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition and eight-core Intel Core i7-6900K. The last two were known as “ Broadwell X ” in their day .
besides, those last two chips should show how far we ‘ve come from a price-to-performance point of view in the last class or so—at least when it comes to tasks that alike lots of cores and threads. But we suspect the Core i7-7820X ‘s chief competition will come from AMD ‘s Ryzen 7 1800X, which was selling for ampere low as $ 429 when we wrote this. The Threadripper 1920X will likely outclass the Core i7-7820X, thanks to its 12 cores. But it besides sells for for $ 799, or a little less. And AMD ‘s Threadripper motherboards are more expensive than many comparable Intel X299 options, so that makes the Threadripper chip in effect more expensive to deploy .
Cinebench R15
First up in our testing regimen : Maxon ‘s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 trial, which is fully threaded to make consumption of all available processor cores and threads, using the CPU preferably than the GPU to render a complex image. The leave is a proprietorship sexual conquest indicating a personal computer ‘s suitability for processor-intensive workloads .
Along with the common test that makes practice of all available cores, we ‘ve added the single-core results here to get a sense of how Intel ‘s eight-core chip fares in lightly threaded workloads .
As we expected, the Core i7-7820X did better here than the Ryzen 7 1800X, but the gulf between the two is n’t vitamin a capital as you might expect given the $ 170 monetary value deviation between the two CPUs alone. Keep in mind, again, that you can pick up B350 motherboards ( with light up and an M.2 connection ) adenine broken as $ 70, or about a third the price you ‘ll pay for an entry-level X299-based display panel for the Intel chip. That said, the Intel Core i7-7820X is a faster performer, pulling 19 percentage ahead of the 1800X on the single-core test hera, and about 8 percentage ahead in the multi-core screen .
The Threadripper 1920X did about 40 percentage better than the Core i7-7820X on the multi-core test, but it ‘s besides a more expensive processor that runs on a costly platform .
iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test
We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Encoding Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a individual CPU core, as much bequest software still does .
music encoding does n’t precisely push a modern CPU to its limits, and surely not ones like these. But this is precisely the kind of test that shows Intel ‘s chips to their best advantage. Intel ‘s late Skylake and Kaby Lake architectures do better than AMD ‘s Zen on single-thread or lightly threaded tasks. That said, unless you ‘re hanging on to some very old programs, most software that can take full advantage of multiple cores and threads has been updated to do then at this bespeak .
The Core i7-7820X managed to do better hera than any early consumer chip we ‘ve tested, if lone by a second gear or two. The much less expensive Intel Core i7-7740X ( not charted here ) finished this same test equitable a second behind the Core i7-7820X. so while the Core i7-7820X excels at lightly threaded workloads, particularly against AMD ‘s offerings, it does n’t truly offer a new degree of performance. The Core i7-7700K, which debuted in January 2017, besides performs about ampere well on this front, for a batch less .
Handbrake 0.9.9
This is a time-consuming test of video-crunching capabilities. Handbrake, a tool normally used for converting television from one format to another, benefits from having lots of cores and threads at your disposal. In this test, we use a nice, big hunk of 4K video to see how the chips perform with a nourish job of this kind. We tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-minute-and-14-second 4K .MOV file ( the 4K showcase short film Tears of Steel ) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video .
On this first real-world test that takes advantage of lots of cores and threads, we again see the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X and 1950X in another league, as we ‘d expect. And the Ryzen 7 1800X was indeed slower than the Core i7-7820X, but not well indeed. The eight-core AMD partially finished this test 25 seconds behind the Core i7-7820X .
POV-Ray 3.7
following up, using the “ All CPUs ” mount, we ran the POV-Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a building complex photo-realistic persona using ray trace. After that, again to get a sense of how the Core i9 handles single-core performance, we ran the same benchmark using the “ One CPU ” dress .
once again here, the Core i7-7820X was a few seconds ahead of the Ryzen 7 1800X on the multi-core examination, and more than two minutes ahead on the longer-running single-core screen. The Ryzen Threadripper 1920X was similarly behind on the single-core quiz, but importantly faster than the Core i7-7820X when all cores and threads were engaged. Given that the Ryzen Threadripper chip has four more physical cores, we ‘d expect that .
Blender 2.77a
Blender is an open-source 3D content-creation program that can be used to design and create ocular effects, animation, and 3D models for use in video games or 3D printing. We open a standard test file ( it ‘s of a flying squirrel ) and time how long the test processor takes to finish the render .
The results here were all reasonably close, with the Core i7-7820X pulling evening with the costly Core i9-7900X chip for the run. interestingly, the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X was just a second behind these two, but the Ryzen 7 1800X landed at the back of the pack, 5 seconds behind its closest competitors .
7-Zip File Compression
last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file-compression software and ran its built-in compression/decompression benchmark, which is another utilitarian quiz of a CPU ‘s multi-core abilities.
This final test showed the eight-core Core i7-7820X in its best faint ( at least on a core-hungry benchmark ), where it eclipsed the Ryzen 7 1800X by more than 20 percentage. If you ‘re frequently compressing/decompressing large file sets, that surely gives the Core i7-7820X an advantage. then again, if such tasks are that significant to your work flow, the Ryzen Threadripper and its 12 cores outpaced the 7820X by about 24 percentage. Again, the Threadripper is a costlier chip on a costly platform. So you ‘ll want to tailor your budget and chopine choices to your needs and your detail work flow .
Overclocking
Overclocking was an interest experience when we tested the high-end Core i9-7900X, in that high temperatures were the limiting divisor with that 140-watt chip, not the system stability and locking issues that are more typical when pushing a central processing unit to its restrict. And holocene report from our baby site, ExtremeTech, indicates we were n’t entirely in those temperature issues with that 10-core Intel Core X .
That was n’t the lawsuit, though, with the Core i7-7820X, probable in function due to the fact that it has eight cores to the Core i9 ‘s 10. With our Deepcool triple-fan fluid cooler, we settled on a clear Turbo Boost rush of 4.7GHz across all cores. Given more time to mess with voltage settings, 4.8GHz ( the overclock accelerate we were able to hit with the Core i7-7740X ), or slenderly higher static speeds might have been possible with this chip. But in our limited screen and pluck time, the Core i7 chip always locked up when running our benchmark tests above 4.7GHz. hush, it ran dependable when at that clock setting. Of course, overclocking abilities often vary from bit to chip, so your results may vary .
At 4.7GHz on all cores, our Cinebench score jumped to 2,032 from 1,747 ( at stock ), an increase of 16 percentage. On the POV-Ray test, our overclock resulted in a variety from 1 minutes and 12 seconds on the “ All CPUs ” screen at stock, to an even 1 minute when overclocked. Again, that ‘s an improvement of about 17 percentage. But even with the best skill and luck, we would n’t expect to eke out a wholly bunch more performance than that from this check. Anything approaching 5GHz is very gamey for modern background silicon, unless you happen to get a identical overclocking-friendly bit. hobbyist overclockers frequently achieve higher results, but that ‘s for shortstop periods using alien cool substances like liquid nitrogen. If you actually want to use your CPU for productiveness or bet on purposes, you ‘ll have to settle for more meek clocks .
Gaming Performance
We do n’t normally run graphics tests when testing processors without integrate graphics. That ‘s largely because graphics performance has a lot more to do with what graphics card you have installed than what central processing unit you ‘re using—especially when you ‘re talking about a brawny chip like the Core i7-7820X .
But after testing AMD ‘s initial streak of Ryzen 7 and 5 chips, we noted they had issues keeping up with Intel ‘s late mainstream Core i5s and Core i7s at 1080p in games. Given this, and the fact that the 10-core Core i9-7900X had some exchangeable gambling issues as the Ryzen chips, we wanted to see if the Core i7-7820X acted in a similar manner. So we used the same Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition poster that we tested with the Ryzen chips to run a couple of the tests that we besides use for graphics-card examination .
For comparison numbers, we did the lapp matter with our non-X Intel Kaby Lake testbed running the Core i7-7700K, as well our Ryzen testbed with the competing Ryzen 7 1800X. All three testbeds were equipped with a series ATA-based SSD boot drive. The RAM in our Core X-Series testbed was specifically running at 3,200MHz, the same rush that we used when testing the Ryzen chips, using the motherboard ‘s built-in XMP profile. The Kaby Lake Z270 testbed had its RAM clocked to a slenderly lower 3,000MHz, which was the highest speed formally supported by our Corsair RAM kit out. The memory clock-speed issue is authoritative because the Ryzen chips tended to perform quite a morsel better at 1080p with faster RAM. And after some initial testing running the RAM at lower ( 2,166MHz ) speeds, we can say the same is true for the Core i9-7900X, as well .
All that said, the performance issues tend to vary from game to bet on, depending on whether or not a given deed is affected by memory rotational latency, which tends to increase when you increase the number of cores. High congress of racial equality counts seem to be the choice divisor in decreased graphics performance at 1080p, because at that resolution, both the Core i9-7900X and Ryzen 5 and 7 chips delivered importantly lower frame rates than a similarly outfitted rig running the quad-core Core i7-7700K. And we ‘re not talking about a few frames per second ( federal protective service ), either. The Core i9 and the Ryzen 5 and 7 chips turned in federal protective service counts that were between 30fps and 40fps lower than what the Core i7-7700K system delivered at the same 1080p resolution, specifically in Far Cry Primal. Those differences were lessened in our other trial title, Rise of the Tomb Raider. But on both titles, when we cranked up the settlement to 4K, effectively taking any CPU bottleneck out of the picture, performance evened out .
We saw like performance delta for the Core i7-7820X as on the Core i9 and Ryzen chips. When we fired up our core X-Series test layer with the Core i7-7820X and ran our rise of the Tomb Raider trial in DirectX 11 mode at the Very High preset, we got a leave of 130fps, which is slenderly higher than the 128fps we saw on the same test with our Core i7-7700K system, and about 6fps behind what we got with the Core i7-7740X dropped into the Core X-Series testbed .
then we switched to the game Far Cry Primal, on the title ‘s High preset. At 1080p in this benchmark, the Core i7-7820X turned in 108fps, a significant 22fps lower than the 130fps that the Core i7-7700K managed on the lapp test and settings. On both games, when we turned the resolution up to 4K ( 3,840×2,160 ), performance evened out, with all the competing chips on all three platforms delivering between 47fps and 49fps on both tests .
The Ryzen 7 1800X exhibits the same return as the Core i7-7820X—only more so. At 1080p in rise of the Tomb Raider, our Ryzen testbed equipped with the 1800X managed just 107fps to the Core i7-7820 ‘s 130fps. And on Far Cry Primal, the Ryzen 7 achieved 83fps to the Core i7 ‘s 108fps. Again, though, stepping up to 4K solution with the Ryzen 7 check pulled it even with the Core i7, at between 47fps and 49fps .
Gaming at 1080p, then, is an area where having fewer cores ( sol long as you have at least four ) was a benefit in at least these two games. And in a struggle of eight-core chips, AMD ‘s eight-core Ryzen 7 1800X could n’t quite keep up with the Core i7-7820X. It should be noted, though, that we tested the Ryzen 7 1800X months ago around the launch of that check. It ‘s probable that with crippled updates and driver tweaks, AMD will have made up at least some of that labor .
What does that tell us ? At least for these two test titles, if you primarily care about gaming at 1080p, a lesser central processing unit, be that from Intel or AMD, is a better option. But actually though, no matchless should be spending this much on a processor and a card like the GTX 1080 to game at 1080p. And if gambling is by far your primary business, you should not be buying a central processing unit with this many cores unless you plan on doing serious multitasking, too—like, say, playing a game while live-streaming your exploits, and encoding a video recording of one of your previous matches in the background. If you only care about gaming performance, you should stick to a chip on a cheaper, mainstream chopine and with fewer cores, like the four-core Core i7-7700K .
All that said, let ‘s not forget : even if you are gaming on a 1080p filmdom, the triple-digit ( or near-triple-digit ) performance we saw in testing with the Core i7-7820X and the Ryzen 7 1800X chips is still very politic. Down in the very world where most of us still game ( in the 60fps scope ), all these high-end chips deliver “ more than good enough ” performance for serious bet on. And if you ‘re investing in a high-end card like the GTX 1080, you should credibly be playing on a monitor that has a higher native resolution than 1080p, anyhow. otherwise, it ‘s like taking out your Ferrari to do laps around the local Wal-Mart park set .
Conclusion
There ‘s nothing inherently wrong with the Core i7-7820X. It ‘s a finely performer in both lightly and heavily threaded workloads, and a huge pace up from what you would have been able to get in this monetary value roll a year or two ago. But so, so many raw CPUs have landed in the desktop-processor market hera in 2017, that it ‘s hard for this check to stand out. If you definitely need more performance than a Ryzen 7 1800X can offer, and peculiarly if you ‘re after a Core X-Series-based processor, the Core i7-7820X is a fine option. And it will give you more PCI Express lanes than the lesser chips in the Core X-Series, like the Core i7-7740X, though not a many as the higher-end Core i9 offerings .
If you can live with a bite less performance, though, it ‘s street fighter to ignore the Ryzen 7 1800X, which costs much less and works with motherboards that can be much cheaper. A board and an 1800X can run you adenine little as $ 500, while a Core i7-7820X and a compatible X299 motherboard together start at about $ 800. The Core i7 chip is decidedly the better performer of the two, but for most people, it ‘s probably not $ 300 better. And if you do want better performance, particularly if you ‘re besides after lots of PCI Express lanes, AMD ‘s Ryzen Threadripper chips are besides enticing in this price rate, though boards that work with those chips are even more expensive, starting at about $ 340 when we wrote this .
bottomland line : While AMD ‘s Zen-based Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper processors have shaken up the background processor world this year, anything more powerful than a Ryzen 7 1800X gets very expensive, very fast. Our advice : Be indisputable you need that extreme point high-end operation, and be fix and bequeath to pay for it, whether it comes on the AMD Threadripper platform or from Intel ‘s competing Core X-Series agate line. Otherwise, nowadays ‘s top-end Ryzen 7 remains a superb aspirational bit for most ordinary users, and evening most exponent users .
Intel Core i7-7820X
3.5
See It
$ 1,249.95
at Amazon
MSRP $ 599.00
Pros
Cons
The Bottom Line
Intel ‘s eight-core Core X Series CPU is a all right performer for serious capacity creators or extreme multi-taskers. But if you can live with slightly less performance, the Ryzen 7 1800X ( and its motherboards ) are a much better value .
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