More Intel Core i7-7700K Processor Reviews Posted Online

It looks like no one feels threatened by Intel embargoes these days as both Hexus and Bit-Tech have posted up reviews on the Intel Core i7-7700K. Both sites posting up reviews on the same day isn’t too surprising as the owner of Hexus bought his long time UK rival Bit-Tech from Dennis Publishing back in 2014.It looks like the two sites shared data or maybe just took turns benchmarking the same processor and posted up reviews of it on the same date. This comes after both Toms Hardware and Expreview posted benchmark results last week. When was the last time we had four big name sites post up Intel desktop reviews/numbers a solid month before they are expected to be released at CES 2017?

The Hexus review ran a slew of tests and found that the Intel Core i7-7700K performed better than the Intel Core i7-6700K in most of the benchmarks. Not a big surprise there as the core clock is 200 MHz faster and the Turbo Boost speed is 300 MHz faster on the 7700K. One would hope that the new flagship Kaby Lake processor is faster than Skylake due to this alone.

When it came to 2D power consumption the Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake processor used slightly more power, but both used an identical amount at idle (40W).

When it came to overclocking the Intel Core i7-7700K was able to be overclocked up to 4.85 GHz at 1.3V. They used the same voltage on the Intel Core i7-6700K and found that they got it up to 4.60 GHz. A 250MHz overclock boost over the previous generation at the same voltage is nice, but not too unexpected since the base clock is 200 MHz higher by default.

Bit-Tech on the other hand got their processor up to 5.10 GHz, but used 1.464V of power to get there, which is pretty high. They were getting temperatures above 90C with a Corsair H105 CPU water cooler with these settings, but it goes to show that 5+ GHz is possible on Kaby Lake with simple closed loop water cooling kits than can be picked up for around $100 USD.

The bad news is that Bit-Tech showed no gaming difference on an AMD Radeon R9 390X video card running Battlefield 1 at 1920 x 1080 on the 7700K and 6700K, even with the 7700K overclocked up to 5.1 GHz. This might be due to the video card being GPU limited and not CPU limited since they were running Ultra image quality settings.

When they ran the Unigine Valley benchmark with ‘high’ settings you can see some nice performance scaling with the overclocked Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake processor.