Intel Core i7-7700K Processor Review

Media Encoding & Encryption Benchmarks

HandBrake v1.0.1 – link

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is popular today as it allows you to transcode multiple input video formats to h.264 output format and is highly multithreaded. We used Big Buck Bunny as our input file, which has become one of the world standards for video benchmarks. For our benchmark scenario we used a standard 2D 4K (3840×2160) 60 FPS clip in the MP4 format and used Handbrake version 1.0.1 to do two things.

We used the new Fast 1080p30 preset to shrink that down to a 1920 x 1080 video clip to reduce the file size. This is something people often do to save space to put movies onto mobile devices. We also ran the workload using the normal preset as it puts the CPU at a higher load than the Fast 1080p30 preset.

X264 HD Encoding – link

the x264 HD Benchmark is a reproducible measure of how fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. Its nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other. We are using x264 HD v5.0.1 for this test.

Media Encoding Benchmark Results Summary: Our media tests showed that the Intel Core i7-7700K Kabylake processor was 6-7% faster in our handbrake test than the Intel Core i7-6700K Skylake processor and an impressive 13-14% faster than the Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell processor. More impressive is the fact that it was 30% to 46% faster than the Intel Core i7-2700K Sandy Bridge processor overclocked up to the same 4.5GHz clock speed. In our x264 HD benchmark the Intel Core i7-7700K was 5% faster on the first pass and a solid 7% faster in the second pass versus the Core i7-6700K. Not bad results here as this will shave tens of minutes off transcoding entire movies.

VeraCrypt 1.19 – link

VeraCrypt is an open-source disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is a fork based on the discontinued TrueCrypt 7.1a utility. The developers claim that weaknesses found in TrueCrypt have been resolved with the VeraCrypt project. This is a popular utility used by people that don’t want to use Microsoft’s built-in encyption tool for Windows 10 called Bitlocker.

Encryption Benchmark Results Summary: This AES Encryption test shows that the Intel Core i7-7700K Kabylake processor was 6% faster than the Intel Core i7-6700K at stock speeds and 12.7% faster when overclocked to 5.1GHz. Speaking of overclocked… Check out the Intel Core i7-2700K overclocked up to 4.5GHz from it’s stock turbo clock of 3.5GHz. The Core i7-7700K is 31% faster than the Core i7-2700K running at the same 4.5GHz speeds.