INTEL CORE I7-7740X
http://www.intel.com £320
It’s a good job these are near £30 cheaper than their Skylake and Kaby Lake cousins, as
that’s about the only saving you’re going to achieve on Intel’s X299 platform. Designed as an
all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all chipset, but not without fault.The release of Ryzen has unsettled the blue beast
and there’s competition back in the market. X299,
Intel’s latest chipset, is an oddity. Comprising
everything from four-core, four-thread parts, to
18-core, 36-thread parts, it makes little sense. With
both the Core i5-7640X and the, pictured, Core
i7-7740X being nothing more than a transplanting of
its Kaby Lake quad-core equivalents onto a larger
CPU PCB, with the integrated graphics
soldered off, 100 MHz added on to the core
clock speeds, and a 21W increase to TDP.The idea is simple. Invest now, with a pricier
motherboard, and a quad-channel memory kit, a
‘cheaper’ dual-channel 2066 processor, and then
invest in one of the meatier eight-core parts later on.
As far as performance goes, it’s identical to our
Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K sample. In short, if you’re
on Haswell or above, we’d say to hold off, unless you
desperately need more processing power.
BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 4.3 GHZ / 4.5 GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 4/8 /
LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 8MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @
2666 MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 16CPU4
INTEGRATED
GPU?
The HEDT platform
doesn’t support any
integrated graphics,
meaning you’ll need a
dedicated GPU.1
PCIE LANES
Although X299
supports 44 PCIe lanes,
these are only available
on the Core i9-7900X
and higher. That’s a
£900 processor.2
SINGLE-CORE
PERFORMANCE
That Kaby Lake
architecture doesn’t
disappoint, delivering 190
points in Cinebench R15.3
DUAL-CHANNEL
WOES
You can only use DDR4
in the left slots, others
are disabled until you
upgrade to a six-core.68 %
Hardware
REVIEWS