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Intel Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K CPU Review

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2017-01-03

2017 is straight starting an exciting year with many important hardware releases scheduled. Intel's current pace of rolling out new processors is overwhelming; each half year we get new processors generations to test and to analyze. Not that we are complaining but for those that want to run the latest and greatest Intel hardware it might become a very expensive and time consuming hobby. Last year at Computex we experienced the introduction of the high end Broadwell-E desktop processor line-up; half a year down the road the more mainstream Skylake series gets replaced by the Kaby Lake generation. Time to get cranking to see what is exactly new here...

Kaby Lake Cache Speed Testing

Another variable we can play with in the Bios is the CPU cache speed. Is it responsible for the bridging between the bandwidth demands of the CPU cores and the installed memory on the motherboard, especially with X99 we have observed solid performance improvements in combination with fast memory when the CPU cache speed was overclocked above the stock value. With Kaby Lake Intel already boosted the Cache speed from 4000MHz to 4200MHz versus the former Sky Lake offering.

We tested with our i7-7700K CPU running the cores at 4800MHz, the 16GB Dual Channel memory runs at 3000MHz and the below different Cache speed scenarios were tested:

4000MHz (underclocked to Sky Lake speeds)
4200MHz (stock speed)
4400MHz
4600MHz
4800MHz (even though read out in CPU-Z as 4600MHz we observed a performance boost)

The AIDA64 test shows only a mild improvement when increasing the Cache speed. Cinebench R15 and the Fritz Chess benchmark however show some noticeable scaling.

Both the rendering and game tests only show a tiny performance boost, nothing really significant to recommend running the cache speed at higher levels. The Intel stock value of 4200MHz is pretty spot on for most applications. Only tweakers and overclockers will try to go for a 1:1 ratio between the CPU speed and Cache to achieve maximum performance.

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