If they wanted to prove overclockability they should have done it under more down to earth circumstances. I'm guessing they don't plan on selling 50 of them to the people who may at some point put them under liquid He.
In the mean time the main benefit you get over a standard Skylake is 900 more pins for the same price. More is better right? Oh, and 20W extra for 100MHz even with the iGPU taken out of the equation.
KLX is the 'intro' to the range and a small modifications of the existing KL chips. I'm sure Intel would've liked a full KLX range but they can't do everything at once!
i want a faster system then my current x99 6 core system. but i don´t want to spend more than 700 euro on the CPU.
i would say AMD offers me the most bang for the buck at the moment. and i was a happy AMD user once (my first PC was 386 AMD, then 486 and athlon xp). but that was when systems crashed once a day (windows 9x).
today i need STABILITY.. it´s way more worth to me than 20% more performance for the same price. and with stability i also mean no driver issues or quirks etc.. not just full blown crashes.
i fear (and that just by reading forums) that AMD new ZEN environment is not that mature yet.
that´s the main reason i still tend more to the intel side.... after 10 years of intel only i think i will need some more time to feel "safe" buying an amd system again.
Ive had my ryzen 8 core for 2.5 months now. Not a single crash in normal use. 100% rock solid.
The in normal use qualifier is only there because ive overclocked. And obviously when trying to find the lmit for overclocking i did have a stress test crash. Outside of stress testing an overclock tho, i havent had a single crash.
I've been running my R5 1600 @ 3.8 and my DDR4 memory @ 2666 for about a month and a half. Also no crashes though the memory overclock did not work until the latest bios update. That said, I think the "quirkyness" noted was because the initial sales were almost exclusively to enthusiasts who started tweaking them straight out of the box (as I did). For someone who just plugged it all in and ran everything at stock, I don't think there would have been any stability issues. With mine, it was the easiest build I ever did. I just hooked everything up and it booted up and ran perfectly the first time I pressed the power button. This is even though it was booting to a Windows 10 installation left over from my old build (i7 2600K + z68 i.e. Intel cpu and Intel chipset). Of course then I immediately started messing with it :) And of course even though the old Windows install was working, I wiped it and re-installed.
Well it's not like DDR4 memory @ 2666 is revolutionary or cutting edge, it's probably stable because it barely pushes anything and everything is running within limits.
I think most of the stability problems come from poor motherboards and a lack of experience. Until one manufacturer solves all the issues the platform is experiencing and can apply those solutions across their range, stability is going to be an issue. On the Intel side most of this was resolved years ago.
Agreed - Intel 1st quarter profit is 3X AMD turnover with a nett loss. Cheaper is not always better but competition benefits us all. I'm still not sure AMD will survive but at least the price gap has narrowed.
He's totally right. You get 20W extra, you also get to save some silicon from the missing iGPU. And don't forget they give you 900 more pins. That's almost double the number of pins for the same price. If that's not a good deal I don't know what is. o_O
The smaller the die gets, the bigger the effect differential thermal contraction (after soldering) has, which stresses the solder. Once you get too small, you start to see the solder fracture and separate the die from the IHS, which is Not Good for cooling.
Skylake-X looks like a good product. Lots of power and many features. No useless IGP to deal with. I don't understand the point of Kaby Lake-X given that it's missing some features, however.
I'm still running a 6-core Ivy Bridge-E on the x79 chipset. I see no point in upgrading, yet. Processors on the X-series chipsets seem to stay relevant for a long time.
Yeah, it's a puzzling product. Doesn't make any sense to me neither. You get a high-end platform, yet you can't use ANY of its features whatsoever with KBL-X (cpus with more cores, the higher pcie count, or higher possible memory amount) (compared to ordinary desktop KBL platform). You do get a higher possible TDP with a supposedly more robust power delivery. The latter being important exactly for the extreme liquid nitrogen cooling guys trying to achieve world record frequencies (all 3 of them). Oh, and you do get a 2% higher single threaded performance (which you could achieve with ordinary OC just the same). Seriously, intel??? It'll just make things way more complicated for motherboard manufacturers.
Yes, but in particular the much fewer pcie lanes is going to be a real problem (the number of memory channels too, but that's more simple). Now, the 28/44 lanes of the "real" cpus for that platform are similar (and that's not something new), but just 16 pcie lanes from the cpu is going to cause headaches. They have to use either plenty of pcie switches, use suboptimal pcie routing if you have a cpu with more lanes, or just provide a board where lots of things just don't work with those kabylake chips (say, a board with 3 m.2 slots, and only one actually works with such a cpu, with the pcie connectivity for this one being provided by the chipset). Albeit my guess is that motherboard manufacturers indeed will go for the latter option. I can't imagine there's a real market for those KBL chips on that platform, hence it makes no sense to tune your boards to work optimally for them with extra effort - intel may require these chips run, but if half the pcie (and m.2) slots don't that's presumably quite ok...
'Confused yet?' I must admit, I am. I'm totally confused at what Intel is trying to do now.
So they've got three different CPUs all at the same price and power points? Wtf? Couldn't they decide what to market and just went 'shit, let's sell them all!!'?
The SKY-X parts make sense, but the KBL-X parts, not so much. I guess the idea is to buy the 2066 motherboard and upgrade later. That's a fairly narrow niche, and a bit of a gamble that 2066 will still be around when one wants to upgrade...
Those guys couldn't even get the dude's name right. Also they didn't bother to link the original work or at least a higher res image: http://bit.ly/2r8Rdkj
Strangely the article above suggests the larger the die area, the more prone to failure the solder joint will be due to the thermal cycles (see figure 4 in link above). But an article linked earlier in the comments suggests exactly the opposite.
My confusion begins at why so many SKUs? If you can afford $1700, surely you're going all in for $300 more. 4 8 12 18 all you really need. And unless you've got several thousand dollars to burn for the sake of bragging rights, who is seriously planning on delidding an 18-core processor just for the overclock?
I'm sitting on a 4770k at a modest 4.3ghz overclock, and will juice this baby up until it fries. Hopefully by then there will be 5ghz base clocks.
Say, you have 18 core chip with 1 or 2 cores broken (does not pass tests at a given power/frequency). Why sell it as 12-core when you can sell it as 16 core for more?
What DOES NOT make sense in the lineup are the 4-core CPUs which are perfectly fine on LGA 1151 and just waste the expensive LGA 2066 motherboard.
"For comparison, Kaby Lake-S CPUs manage around 7100 MHz. The absolute world record frequency is around 8800 MHz, held by Andre Yang on an AMD FX-8350 processor, although the KBL-X CPU wins here with IPC"
Why would you bring IPC into this context. With this kind of overclocking they can barely idle in windows, IPC means absolutely nothing here.
I do a lot of CAD work. SolidWorks models can be enormously complex and performance is entirely single-threaded. It can take 15 minutes to open a large model. Any boost in single-threaded performance is beneficial.
7740X is a downgrade from 7700K - why did they disable the powerful 620 GPU with 4k video and Quicksync (QSV) ?? I was hoping for a faster o/clocked CPU WITH Graphics.
Don't take this the wrong way, but were you joking about the HD 630 being powerful? Any discrete GPU from either Nvidia 10-series or AMD 500-series will curbstomp it, and have all of the features you mentioned (not technically Quicksync, but the equivalent)
Its actually the same exact die as in the 7700k. Just disabled the igpu, threw it into a different package and called it a new chip. All the extra cost associated with the x299 platform with NONE of the benefit.
The only cavet to that is there is a possible small benefit of having a bigger heat spreader. You may be able to cool it very slightly better, all other things being equal. Looking at the paste job in the photos above, i have my doubts about that heh.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
54 Comments
Back to Article
SkyDiver - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
First comment. Isn't that what people do?Mo3tasm - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Not here!alamilla - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
This isn't WCCFTechChaitanya - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
milking spree to max.close - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
If they wanted to prove overclockability they should have done it under more down to earth circumstances. I'm guessing they don't plan on selling 50 of them to the people who may at some point put them under liquid He.In the mean time the main benefit you get over a standard Skylake is 900 more pins for the same price. More is better right? Oh, and 20W extra for 100MHz even with the iGPU taken out of the equation.
Samus - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
The only thing milky about this article is that someone nutted all over that CPU.RRoy - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Ok..thank You Intel for fast response but I will still buy AMD:)jjj - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
The 6 core Skylake X renders Kaby Lake X utterly pointless.Meteor2 - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
KLX is the 'intro' to the range and a small modifications of the existing KL chips. I'm sure Intel would've liked a full KLX range but they can't do everything at once!christophermx4 - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
I'd be much more curious about overclocking results with a normal AIO cooler..Gothmoth - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
for me it all comes down to stability.i want a faster system then my current x99 6 core system.
but i don´t want to spend more than 700 euro on the CPU.
i would say AMD offers me the most bang for the buck at the moment.
and i was a happy AMD user once (my first PC was 386 AMD, then 486 and athlon xp).
but that was when systems crashed once a day (windows 9x).
today i need STABILITY.. it´s way more worth to me than 20% more performance for the same price. and with stability i also mean no driver issues or quirks etc.. not just full blown crashes.
i fear (and that just by reading forums) that AMD new ZEN environment is not that mature yet.
that´s the main reason i still tend more to the intel side....
after 10 years of intel only i think i will need some more time to feel "safe" buying an amd system again.
29a - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
If you want stability just make sure you buy a good power supply.none12345 - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Ive had my ryzen 8 core for 2.5 months now. Not a single crash in normal use. 100% rock solid.The in normal use qualifier is only there because ive overclocked. And obviously when trying to find the lmit for overclocking i did have a stress test crash. Outside of stress testing an overclock tho, i havent had a single crash.
Ratman6161 - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
I've been running my R5 1600 @ 3.8 and my DDR4 memory @ 2666 for about a month and a half. Also no crashes though the memory overclock did not work until the latest bios update. That said, I think the "quirkyness" noted was because the initial sales were almost exclusively to enthusiasts who started tweaking them straight out of the box (as I did).For someone who just plugged it all in and ran everything at stock, I don't think there would have been any stability issues. With mine, it was the easiest build I ever did. I just hooked everything up and it booted up and ran perfectly the first time I pressed the power button. This is even though it was booting to a Windows 10 installation left over from my old build (i7 2600K + z68 i.e. Intel cpu and Intel chipset). Of course then I immediately started messing with it :) And of course even though the old Windows install was working, I wiped it and re-installed.
HomeworldFound - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
Well it's not like DDR4 memory @ 2666 is revolutionary or cutting edge, it's probably stable because it barely pushes anything and everything is running within limits.HomeworldFound - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
I think most of the stability problems come from poor motherboards and a lack of experience. Until one manufacturer solves all the issues the platform is experiencing and can apply those solutions across their range, stability is going to be an issue. On the Intel side most of this was resolved years ago.prisonerX - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
If you want stability keep taking your medication.AGS3 - Thursday, June 1, 2017 - link
Agreed - Intel 1st quarter profit is 3X AMD turnover with a nett loss. Cheaper is not always better but competition benefits us all. I'm still not sure AMD will survive but at least the price gap has narrowed.jimjamjamie - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Classic Intel. +100 MHz and job well done.Gothmoth - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
are you unable to read or just ignorant?jimjamjamie - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Are you a troll or just a prick?close - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
He's totally right. You get 20W extra, you also get to save some silicon from the missing iGPU. And don't forget they give you 900 more pins. That's almost double the number of pins for the same price. If that's not a good deal I don't know what is. o_ORaniz - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
The iGPU is still there but disabled, so you're wasting silicon rather than saving it.Gothmoth - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
the kaby lake is a niche product... the skylake-x is the news today.edzieba - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
"Using a cheaper thermal paste over an indium-tin solder is one way so save 1 cent on a $350 CPU."It's not down to price, it's down to die size. The Kaby Lake dies are just too small to solder reliably, same as every consumer die since Ivy Bridge. http://overclocking.guide/the-truth-about-cpu-sold...
drexnx - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
"we can fit 1.75 billion transistors into a 122mm2 area, but soldering it? what are you crazy?"edzieba - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
The smaller the die gets, the bigger the effect differential thermal contraction (after soldering) has, which stresses the solder. Once you get too small, you start to see the solder fracture and separate the die from the IHS, which is Not Good for cooling.HomeworldFound - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
I'd be willing to put up with that issue if Intel could guarantee the processor would last two years.colonelclaw - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
A new socket? Sigh...HomeworldFound - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
What do you expect.. there's an 18 core chip.BigDragon - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Skylake-X looks like a good product. Lots of power and many features. No useless IGP to deal with. I don't understand the point of Kaby Lake-X given that it's missing some features, however.I'm still running a 6-core Ivy Bridge-E on the x79 chipset. I see no point in upgrading, yet. Processors on the X-series chipsets seem to stay relevant for a long time.
mczak - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Yeah, it's a puzzling product. Doesn't make any sense to me neither. You get a high-end platform, yet you can't use ANY of its features whatsoever with KBL-X (cpus with more cores, the higher pcie count, or higher possible memory amount) (compared to ordinary desktop KBL platform).You do get a higher possible TDP with a supposedly more robust power delivery. The latter being important exactly for the extreme liquid nitrogen cooling guys trying to achieve world record frequencies (all 3 of them).
Oh, and you do get a 2% higher single threaded performance (which you could achieve with ordinary OC just the same). Seriously, intel??? It'll just make things way more complicated for motherboard manufacturers.
Rmcan - Friday, June 2, 2017 - link
How does it make it more complicated for motherboard manufacturers? They're all the same socket.mczak - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
Yes, but in particular the much fewer pcie lanes is going to be a real problem (the number of memory channels too, but that's more simple). Now, the 28/44 lanes of the "real" cpus for that platform are similar (and that's not something new), but just 16 pcie lanes from the cpu is going to cause headaches. They have to use either plenty of pcie switches, use suboptimal pcie routing if you have a cpu with more lanes, or just provide a board where lots of things just don't work with those kabylake chips (say, a board with 3 m.2 slots, and only one actually works with such a cpu, with the pcie connectivity for this one being provided by the chipset).Albeit my guess is that motherboard manufacturers indeed will go for the latter option. I can't imagine there's a real market for those KBL chips on that platform, hence it makes no sense to tune your boards to work optimally for them with extra effort - intel may require these chips run, but if half the pcie (and m.2) slots don't that's presumably quite ok...
Meteor2 - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
'Confused yet?' I must admit, I am. I'm totally confused at what Intel is trying to do now.So they've got three different CPUs all at the same price and power points? Wtf? Couldn't they decide what to market and just went 'shit, let's sell them all!!'?
Meteor2 - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
The SKY-X parts make sense, but the KBL-X parts, not so much. I guess the idea is to buy the 2066 motherboard and upgrade later. That's a fairly narrow niche, and a bit of a gamble that 2066 will still be around when one wants to upgrade...futrtrubl - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
I think the idea is to kill overclocking on consumer non-X systems and upsell them to X. I expect to see the K processors disappear shortly.Raniz - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
That doesn't seem too far-fetched, sadlywoggs - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
"save 1 cent on a $350 CPU."Spoken like a 10 year old. It's about the reliability...
http://www.indium.com/blog/die-size-vs-temperature...
close - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
Those guys couldn't even get the dude's name right. Also they didn't bother to link the original work or at least a higher res image: http://bit.ly/2r8RdkjStrangely the article above suggests the larger the die area, the more prone to failure the solder joint will be due to the thermal cycles (see figure 4 in link above). But an article linked earlier in the comments suggests exactly the opposite.
Rmcan - Friday, June 2, 2017 - link
My confusion begins at why so many SKUs? If you can afford $1700, surely you're going all in for $300 more. 4 8 12 18 all you really need. And unless you've got several thousand dollars to burn for the sake of bragging rights, who is seriously planning on delidding an 18-core processor just for the overclock?I'm sitting on a 4770k at a modest 4.3ghz overclock, and will juice this baby up until it fries. Hopefully by then there will be 5ghz base clocks.
peevee - Friday, June 2, 2017 - link
Say, you have 18 core chip with 1 or 2 cores broken (does not pass tests at a given power/frequency). Why sell it as 12-core when you can sell it as 16 core for more?What DOES NOT make sense in the lineup are the 4-core CPUs which are perfectly fine on LGA 1151 and just waste the expensive LGA 2066 motherboard.
Meteor2 - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
They open an upgrade path.none12345 - Tuesday, May 30, 2017 - link
"For comparison, Kaby Lake-S CPUs manage around 7100 MHz. The absolute world record frequency is around 8800 MHz, held by Andre Yang on an AMD FX-8350 processor, although the KBL-X CPU wins here with IPC"Why would you bring IPC into this context. With this kind of overclocking they can barely idle in windows, IPC means absolutely nothing here.
lizanosi - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
Thanks For usefull information http://www.promocodeway.com/coupon/gopuff-promo-co...PA2SK - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
I do a lot of CAD work. SolidWorks models can be enormously complex and performance is entirely single-threaded. It can take 15 minutes to open a large model. Any boost in single-threaded performance is beneficial.prisonerX - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
Maybe you should think about migrating to less retarded software.babadivad - Wednesday, May 31, 2017 - link
These CPUs are completely worthless.AGS3 - Thursday, June 1, 2017 - link
7740X is a downgrade from 7700K - why did they disable the powerful 620 GPU with 4k video and Quicksync (QSV) ?? I was hoping for a faster o/clocked CPU WITH Graphics.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, June 1, 2017 - link
Don't take this the wrong way, but were you joking about the HD 630 being powerful? Any discrete GPU from either Nvidia 10-series or AMD 500-series will curbstomp it, and have all of the features you mentioned (not technically Quicksync, but the equivalent)Meteor2 - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
Assuming not a joke... it's so the the power/thermal budget can be used exclusively by the CPU.none12345 - Thursday, June 1, 2017 - link
Its actually the same exact die as in the 7700k. Just disabled the igpu, threw it into a different package and called it a new chip. All the extra cost associated with the x299 platform with NONE of the benefit.The only cavet to that is there is a possible small benefit of having a bigger heat spreader. You may be able to cool it very slightly better, all other things being equal. Looking at the paste job in the photos above, i have my doubts about that heh.
Rmcan - Friday, June 2, 2017 - link
Give me a quad core 10ghz processor and call it a day, Intel.Socaltyger - Saturday, June 3, 2017 - link
It's so they have something "new" to compete with Ryzen price points.