Intel Core i7-7700K And Z270 Chipset Review: Kaby Lake Hits The Desktop

Name: Core i7-7700K
Brand: Core

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 03, 2017, 12:01 PM EDT

Cinebench R15 is a combination CPU and OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Cinebench

3D Rendering Benchmark

cinebench

The quad-core, Core i7-7700K doesn't have a chance to catch the Broadwell-E based Core i7-6950X, or the Haswell-E based Core i7-5960X for that matter in the multi-threaded test, but it does put up the best single-threaded result, and bests all of the AMD processors and previous-gen Intel quad-cores.

POV-Ray Performance

Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray , or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

pov ray

The story is essentially the same with POV-Ray. Here, the Core i7-7700K pulls ahead of the Skylake-based Core i7-6700K, but it can't catch the higher-end processors with their additional cores.

STARS Euler3d

Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is heavily threaded and is also dependent on platform bandwidth, so the results SHOULD have looked like the two above it, but the Core i7-7700K trailed the Core i7-6700K here. We suspect the slightly higher latencies of the G-SKILL kit we used to test Kaby Lake held it back somewhat.

Tags: Intel, core i7, CPU, processor, kaby-lake

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com