Intel Core i9-7900X And Core i7-7740X CPU Review: Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X Debut

by Dave Altavilla, Marco Chiappetta — Monday, June 19, 2017, 09:00 AM EDT

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Intel Core i9-7900X And Core i7-7740X - Gaming And Graphics

We also ran some high-resolution game and graphics tests on Intel's latest processors using 3DMark, Hitman, and Ashes Of The Singularity. We used 3DMark's Fire Strike Ultra preset, and both of the games were run with all in-game graphics options set to their maximum values, save for the Ashes 1080P test where we used the "High" preset. Note, we also swapped out the GTX 960 for a more powerful GeForce GTX 1080 here.

High Resolution Gaming Tests

1080P and 4K Gaming With GeForce GTX 1080

The 3DMark Fire Strike results are tightly grouped, but ultimately the Core i9-7900x ended up trailing some of the previous generation processors.

The Core i9-7900X trailed the Core i7-6950X at 1080P, but pulled well ahead of the AMD Ryzen 7 series processors.

Ashes Of The Singularity tells somewhat of a similar story to Hitman, but performance is more tightly grouped. The Core i9-7900X actually trailed some of the previous-gen Intel processors at both resolutions. It seems the architectural and cache changes introduced with Skylake-X will require some optimizations in regard to gaming performance.