Skip to Main Content

Intel Core i7-7700K Review

4.0
Excellent

The Bottom Line

Intel's "Kaby Lake" Core i7 flagship is speedy, with hardware support for 4K streaming and HDR for services like Netflix, but performance gains over its previous-generation counterpart are fairly minimal.

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

Pros

  • Fastest CPU available.
  • Hardware support for HDR and 4K streaming.
  • Modest overclocking improvements.

Cons

  • Minimal speed upgrade over previous-generation flagship Core i7 chip.

The Core i7-7700K ($350) is part of Intel's seventh-generation Kaby Lake desktop processor family. These chips feature the same hardware decoding engine for 4K streaming from services like Netflix and other streaming providers that was packed into the mobile processors in the same Kaby Lake family. And Intel has managed to raise the base clock of this Core i7 chip to 4.2GHz, compared with the 4GHz base clock of the Core i7-6700K it's supplanting. That helps propel the Core i7-7700K to new performance levels for this class of processors. But that performance is more or less in line with the low-double-digit percent gains we saw in mobile seventh-generation chips. In other words, if you have a high-end Skylake chip, or even a Broadwell or Haswell i7, there may not be a compelling reason to upgrade—at least right away.

But what about overclocking, and the new 200-series chipsets that roll out with these processors as well? For that, we'll need to delve a little deeper. We'll do that in the next section, as well as get into one of the seventh-generation lineup's most intriguing new features: support for Intel's upcoming XPoint-based Optane memory, which is expected to hit the market sometime in the first half of 2017.

You Can Trust Our Reviews
Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. Read our editorial mission & see how we test.

Features and Other New Chips

It would be an understatement to say that Intel is dropping a whole lot of seventh-generation chips alongside the Core i7-7700K. By our count, looking at the company's press materials, the total number of seventh-generation chips available with the brand-new releases (including the flagship desktop chip we're discussing here and the previous U- and Y-Series mobile parts that launched in the fall of 2016) is 42. You won't find the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in that number. But you will find plenty of new mobile chips, including several business-focused models with support for things like vPro and more secure biometrics, as well as a whole lineup of H-Series quad-core chips that are most often found in gaming laptops and mobile workstations.

Intel Core i7-7700K ("Kaby Lake")

But of course we're here to talk about desktop processors, and 16 of the new chips are of that variety. The good news is that these CPUs use the LGA 1151 socket, so they should be drop-in compatible with many previous-generation (Skylake) motherboards, although you'll probably need to install a BIOS update first.

Rather than rattle off all 16 new chips and their specs, here's a list of the new desktop SKUs and their specs, direct from Intel.

Intel Core i7-7700K ("Kaby Lake")

Note that, at a 91-watt TDP (thermal design power, a measure of required heat dissipation), the Core i7-7700K we're looking at here matches that of the Core i7-6700K, its counterpart in the previous sixth-generation lineup. Considering the architecture is fundamentally the same and clock speeds aren't all that different, that's expected. In fact, the specs between this chip and the one it's designed to replace are so similar that we only had to change a few digits when writing up the specs of the new model compared with the sixth-generation i7-6700K.

Essentially, compared with the Core i7-6700K, Intel boosted the base clock from 4GHz to 4.2GHz with the new chip, and upped the top Turbo Boost frequency at stock speeds from 4.2GHz to 4.5GHz. The integrated graphics chip gets a boost in name from HD Graphics 530 on the previous chip to HD Graphics 630 on the newer models, but the 1,150MHz dynamic frequency remains the same. And an Intel rep told us that aside from the new media engine for HEVC 10-bit content (the chosen codec for streaming 4K content from the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and likely soon-to-be other providers), the graphics core here is fundamentally the same. That's interesting, because as we'll see in testing, we did notice some performance improvements on the graphics front. But that may solely be down to higher supported RAM speeds (which we'll detail shortly in the chipset section coming up).

Intel Core i7-7700K ("Kaby Lake")

The most interesting chip in Intel's new desktop lineup seems to be the Core i3-7350K ($72.80 at Amazon) . The company's first unlocked Core i3 CPU, it's a dual-core, four-thread chip with the same 4.2GHz base clock speed (it has no Turbo Boost) as the i7 chip we're looking at here. It looks to be a strong candidate for a budget-friendly gaming chip, and a good general-use part for those who don't often do things like render massive video files (which will take full advantage of the four cores and eight threads of the i7), as well. In fact, with its high base clock speed and much lower price, it has the potential to steal a fair bit of thunder from Intel's costlier chips, as it should be just as quick for most general computing tasks. The Core i3-7350K is listed at $168, while the Core i7-7700K we're reviewing here lists at $339. These are prices for chips in 1,000-unit lots, but unless there are shortages (which there were for a while when the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K launched), street prices tend to generally hover close to Intel's "1ku" pricing for at least a few months after launch.

Z270 Chipset Details

Just as it has with previous chip generations, Intel is outing a handful of new chipsets alongside its seventh-generation desktop processors, including H270 and H250 for mainstream systems, and B250 for business machines. But we'll be focusing on Z270 here, as that's the top-end chipset, aimed at enthusiasts and overclockers, and so the one best paired with a high-end chip like the Core i7-7700K.

There's no getting around the fact that, much the way the seventh-generation processors are a refined but very similar update over their sixth-generation counterparts, Z270 has a whole lot in common with the Z170 chipset it's succeeding. Intel's press material on the new chipset is just five pages long, and about three of those pages are taken up by photos of young people doing things like singing in a studio and assembling a scientific model in front of a laptop.

Again, looking at the same diagram for the Z170 chipset, most of what's here is the same. The fundamental changes include four additional PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 lanes. But they're hanging off the chipset, not directly connected to the CPU, so they aren't meant for extra graphics cards. That's becoming increasingly unnecessary, anyway, as Nvidia has limited its latest high-end cards (the GeForce GTX 1080 ($549.00 at NVIDIA) and GTX 1070 ($399.00 at NVIDIA) ) to just two cards in SLI. Also, the DMI 3.0 interlink between the chipset and the CPU itself is the same bandwidth-limiting connection as in the Z170 chipset, so the pipe connecting the chipset to the processor isn't any wider or faster.

That means you can think of the Z270's extra four lanes like additional "plugs" in a power strip, in that they let you add more devices, but the level of voltage and current from the wall is the same. The lanes will allow you to install more bandwidth-hungry devices, say fast PCIe/NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) like Samsung's excellent SSD 960 EVO . The Z270 chipset does support three-way PCIe RAID SSD setups (as Z170 did). And we're starting to see more and more of these kinds of drives, as well as Thunderbolt 3 external devices like monitors, which can also eat up lots of bandwidth. So having the ability to plug more things into the PCIe pipe is definitely a good thing. But just as we saw in previous-generation boards, installing some device types will likely then disable others, as there's still a limited amount of data that can travel between the CPU and the chipset (and vice versa) in a given time period.

Another change with Z270 is a bump up in officially supported RAM speeds, from 2,133MHz with Z170 to 2,400MHz here. That's nice, as higher memory speeds can make a big difference for integrated graphics performance. But RAM makers have long blown past Intel's officially supported RAM speeds. The Corsair DDR4 set we used for our Skylake testbed was rated to run at 3,000MHz (and ran at that speed without issue), and G.Skill sent us a 16GB TridentZ kit for testing Intel's new chips that ran at 3,600MHz after ticking on an XMP profile with a couple of clicks in the BIOS. So Intel's officially rated RAM speeds are of little importance to system builders. They may, though, result in faster RAM for big-box desktops and all-in-ones, as those types of systems are more likely to stick with officially supported settings.

The last major addition of the Z270 chipset, in tandem with the new seventh-generation processors, is support for Intel's upcoming Optane memory, which the company says will arrive sometime in the first half of 2017. Now, the frustrating thing is that the details about Optane memory are still scarce. Intel tells us it will be based on the same 3D XPoint (pronounced "cross point") technology as its promised upcoming XPoint-based SSDs. Basically, the promise behind XPoint is that it will be able to provide speeds and extremely low latency similar to RAM, with capacities like those of SSDs, all with the non-volatile nature that we're used to from storage drives—meaning data won't be lost if the power is interrupted, as is the case with RAM. But Intel says that Optane memory is distinct from Optane SSDs, and that the former will be used as an extremely fast cache for hard drives (and presumably SSDs). This sounds much like how solid-state cache was used commonly in systems a few years back, to make hard drives more responsive in the days when SSDs were too expensive, or the way SSD caches are still used in hybrid hard drives.

Intel Core i7-7700K ("Kaby Lake")

This all sounds promising, but as of this writing, it's unclear what physical form Optane memory will take (though it has been announced as short M.2 drives in some upcoming Lenovo ThinkPads), how much it will cost, or how much real-world advantage users will see compared with just using traditional SSDs, which are becoming increasingly affordable. After all, excellent budget SSDs like the Crucial MX300 ($149.95 at Amazon) are selling for less than $130 for a 525GB model. So Optane memory would have to be extremely inexpensive or very impressive (or both) to find broad uptake from enthusiasts, particularly in the desktop space.

We have no doubt that Optane memory will provide a huge boost in the snappiness of a system that's running off of a traditional hard drive, but the enthusiasts who are most likely to buy into new technology like Optane early on are less likely to be building a new system based solely around a spinning drive for storage. And even lightning-quick NVMe SSDs like the aforementioned Samsung 960 EVO or Intel's own 750 Series SSD , while they deliver much faster performance in benchmarks and when reading or writing several gigabytes of files, don't feel any faster than a good SATA SSD in general use.

In other words, Optane memory support sounds good, and it's great to have future-looking features on board (pun intended) when you're building a new PC. But we'll have to wait and see how this new technology manifests before deciding whether or not support for it is a major selling point. Interestingly, Intel was quick to point out that both a seventh-generation CPU and a 200-series motherboard are a requirement for Optane memory, meaning you can't install it in a previous-generation Z170 motherboard, even with a Core brand-new i7-7700K processor in the socket. But when pressed, Intel representatives would not say the same about support for Optane SSDs. And really, for enthusiasts, Optane drives sound much more appealing that Optane caching tech. We'll just have to wait to see how this plays out as 2017 progresses.

We started our testing of the Core i7-7700K with our CPU-centric trials. Our comparison chips for this leg of testing are the aforementioned Core i7-6700K and two lesser chips in the Skylake lineup, the Core i5-6600K and the Core i3-6100 ($100.00 at Amazon) . For some perspective on what spending (a lot) more on a CPU will get you, we dropped in the $1,000 Core i7-6900K ($120.00 at Amazon) , which is an eight-core, 16-thread beast that's part of Intel's enthusiast "Broadwell-E" platform. And to give a smattering of what AMD currently has to offer before the (supposedly imminent) shift to the Zen/AM4 platform, we added the AMD Athlon X4 845, a quad-core chip that's great for budget gaming builds, partially because it sells for under $70. And to give the Intel chip some competition on the graphics front, we added the company's current top end "APU," the A10-7890K ($488.88 at Amazon) , which sells for about $160. Neither AMD chip will compete with the i7 on CPU tests, but the A10-7890K may outpace the much pricier Core i7-7700K when it comes to gaming with the chips' integrated graphics.

Cinebench R15

First up is Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads while using the CPU rather than GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Cine

Right off the bat, the Core i7-7700K delivers the performance we'd expect, showing about a 12 percent boost over the previous-generation i7-6700K at stock settings. It also trounces the Skylake i5 chip by about 65 percent. But the eight-core i7-6900K understandably dominates, posting a 70 percent higher result than the Kaby Lake chip in this test. Of course, the i7-6900K also costs about three times as much as the Kaby Lake i7 we're focusing on here. So at least in a general sense, you get what you pay for with this benchmark.

iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test

We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a single CPU core, as much legacy software does.

itunes

Music encoding doesn't exactly push a modern CPU to its limits, and certainly not one like this. But this test still illustrates that for programs that are older or haven't been written to take advantage of multiple cores, the Core i7-7700K is king, thanks to higher clock speed and Intel's newest architecture. It even managed to leave the $1,000 Core i7-6900K behind. But the previous-generation Core i7-6700K that this chip is replacing is close enough that you'd need a stopwatch on your side to tell the difference.

Handbrake 0.9.9

These days, our traditional Handbrake test (run under version 0.9.8) now takes less than a minute to complete with high-end chips. (It involves the rendering of a 5-minute video, Pixar's Dug's Special Mission, to an iPhone-friendly format.) So, we've switched to a much more taxing (and time-consuming) 4K video-crunching test.

In this test, we switched to the newer Handbrake version 0.9.9, and tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-minute-and-14-second 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase short film Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video…

hand

The i7-7700K pulled a little further ahead of its previous-generation counterpart on this test, and easily bested everything other than the i7-6900K. But again, the difference between the Kaby Lake chip and the Skylake model that's taking its place is about 12 percent. It's appreciated, but not anything worth upgrading over if you're strictly interested in raw performance and you already have a have a recent Core i7 chip.

Photoshop CS6

Next up is our Photoshop CS6 benchmark, where we run a series of 11 filters, in sequence, on a labs-standard high-res photo, timing how long it takes the system to render the effect.

adobe

On this test that relies on a mixture of CPU muscle and bursty drive performance, the i7-7700K once again managed to come out ahead of everything else. But at just 8 seconds ahead of its predecessor, it's not ushering in drastically different levels of performance.

POV Ray 3.7

This is the last of our CPU-centric tests. Using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing.

POV

Here, once again, the Core i7-7700K looked good against everything save for the much pricier Core i7-6900K, with another roughly 12 percent gain over the i7-6700K. But this test also illustrates the advantage of the extra cores of costlier chips like the i7-6900K. That chip was about 60 percent faster than the Kaby Lake i7, which can save a whole lot of time if you're often doing things like editing 4K video or rendering complex graphics in programs like Blender.

Overclocking

Since Intel's seventh-generation processors are the third chip generation built on the company's 14nm process, there was some hope that there would be improved overclocking headroom with the latest unlocked "K" series processors. And there have been some positive early signs, including reports that a Russian site got its hands on an early Core i7-7700K and was able to get it running at a stable 7GHz. But that feat was accomplished using liquid nitrogen for cooling, and with all but one of the chip's four cores disabled.

Intel did make some appreciated changes for overclockers with this generation, which may lead to easier and higher top clock speeds for some. The company introduced a B Clock-aware voltage/frequency curve, which looks at the base clock frequency and dynamically adjusts voltage with the aim of achieving the frequency you're asking the chip to deliver. There's also an AVX offset adjustment now, which lets you dial back the abilities of this feature (which is primarily used for scientific workloads but can use a fair bit of power at stock settings, even when it's not being used). Intel says dialing this back can allow for slightly higher clock speeds.

Intel Core i7-7700K ("Kaby Lake")

We tested our Core i7-7700K review chip on an MSI Z270 Gaming M5 motherboard, connected to a hefty Corsair H100i GTX self-contained cooler with a 240mm radiator, and the aforementioned 16GB of G.Skill TridentZ RAM. Using Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility, we started dialing things up and...well, we didn't get very far.

Our review sample seemed to hit a hard wall at a top Turbo frequency of 4.8GHz, or just 300MHz past the stock 4.5GHz boost. The chip was stable at that setting, and the cooler kept it hovering around 70 degrees C under load. But every attempt to push it just one notch higher to 4.9GHz resulted in an immediate blue screen or system lockup as soon as we started any benchmark. The 4.8GHz overclock we achieved was able to push our Cinebench score up to 1,039, which is about 5 percent above the stock score of 992. But we actually got a slightly higher score of 1,049 when we initially tested the overclocking abilities of the previous-generation Core i6-6700K, which we were able to get stable at 4.85GHz.

Given more time to play around with the settings, it's possible we could have hit even higher stable clock speeds. And of course, overclockability often varies between individual chips, so your mileage may vary. But at least with our particular chip, there doesn't appear to be substantially more overclocking headroom than on its previous-generation Skylake counterpart. And remember, if you don't pay close attention to your temperatures, you can damage your processor, so be sure you know what you're doing before aiming for high clock-speed and voltage settings.

Graphics Performance

You'll notice some changes to the comparison CPUs below in our graphics tests, versus the ones in our preceding CPU Performance section; we've removed the AMD Athlon X4 845 ($50.00 at Amazon) , as it doesn't have integrated graphics. (You'll have to use a dedicated graphics card with that chip.) And in the interest of focusing more closely on comparisons with the previous-generation Core i7 chip and AMD's higher-end APU offerings (which deliver competitive integrated graphics performance at a lower price), we've also nixed the Core i3-6100 and Core i5-6600K here. For details about how those two chips perform when it comes to gaming, you can check their respective reviews. We also dropped in the AMD A10-7860K ($109.99 at Tiger Direct) here, a more budget-friendly chip that delivers similar graphics performance to the higher-priced A10-7890K at a more affordable price of about $110.

We started out our graphics testing of the Core i7-6700K's HD 530 graphics with the 2013 version of Futuremark's 3DMark, starting out with the midrange Cloud Gate test, then moving up to the high-end Fire Strike test, both of which are designed to measure a system's overall graphics capabilities.

cloudgate
firestrike
Once again, the Core i7-7700K delivered a small boost over the i7-6700K, as much as 15 to 16 percent on the more demanding Fire Strike test. But on that test, the much more affordable AMD A10 chips held a significant lead. Let's see how that holds up when it comes to actual game frame rates.

Tomb Raider and Sleeping Dogs

Next we ran a couple of graphically demanding (though not cutting-edge) Steam games, 2013's Tomb Raider, and 2012's Sleeping Dogs, to see what kind of real-world performance the i7-7700K's HD 630 graphics could deliver.

normal

The Core i7-7700K edged over the 30 frames per second (fps) threshold of playability at 1080p here, and even managed to come in a frame faster than the AMD A10-7890K, a strong turnaround from Fire Strike. But moving to the Ultra setting, where graphics hardware matters much more than CPU prowess, things shift in AMD's favor.

ultra

The AMD A10 chips managed to pull an upset here, but really all but the A10-7890K are on the cusp of playability even at the lower resolution. Stepping up to 1080p, none of these chips delivers playable frame rates at high settings.

dogs

Once again in Sleeping Dogs, the Core i7-7700K edged out its previous-generation counterpart by 4fps to 7fps, and delivered a little more wiggle room at 1080p. The AMD A10-7890K is the clear leader here if all you care about is gaming, however. It also costs about $200 less than the Core i7-7700K. But then, no one should realistically be buying this i7 chip primarily for its gaming abilities. In short, if paired with fast RAM, the HD 630 graphics on the Core i7-7700K should deliver playable performance at around 720p with many titles at mid-to-high settings, or mid-to-low settings at 1080p.

But if you are spending this much on a CPU and you care at all about gaming, you should probably invest in a dedicated graphics card. Even a modest dedicated card like the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti ($369.00 at Amazon) will deliver roughly three times the graphics performance as Intel's integrated option, for well under $200. And if you don't care much about extremely fast processor performance, AMD's A10 chips will deliver similar or slightly better gaming performance for less than half the price of the Core i7-7700K.

Conclusion

We knew going into this chip review that performance gains would be fairly minimal compared with comparable previous-generation parts. That was indicated by the results that we'd already seen from mobile seventh-generation CPUs, and the fact that, aside from the addition of some new media-centric circuitry to better support streaming 4K and HDR content, the Kaby Lake architecture is fundamentally the same as the Skylake silicon that came before it. Intel was just able to turn up the clock speeds a bit.

Company reps told us that would result in CPU-specific performance gains in the low double digits, and that's pretty much what we saw—a general jump of 10 to 15 percent. We had hoped that stock clock boost would be accompanied by some more overclocking headroom, but in our chip at least, we didn't see that.

Intel Core i7-7700K ("Kaby Lake")

Likewise, the Z270 chipset that arrives with the seventh-generation Core road show brings some welcome additions, including some more PCIe lanes for plugging more bandwidth-hungry devices into the pipeline. In a world that's increasingly full of such devices, that's definitely welcome.

Still, it's pretty fair to say the chipset in general and the Core i7-7700K specifically are about as minimal an upgrade as we've seen from one chip generation to the next—at least from Intel. The company's underdog rival AMD has spent the past couple of years making similarly minimal performance gains, and generally falling further and further behind Intel when it comes to high-end processors.

But that seems about to change, as AMD continues to release more promising details about its imminent Zen architecture. The latest demonstration from AMD, as well as recent leaked benchmarks, seem to show its top-end "Ryzen" processor going toe to toe not with a processor of the Core i7-7700K's class, but with the much higher-end eight-core, $1,000 Core i7-6900K.

We don't know anything about pricing for that chip yet, or what lesser chips will land below it and when. And we know even less about how AMD's new chipset(s) will stack up against Intel's in terms of modern features. But as fine a performer as the Core i7-7700K is, unless you really need to build a new performance-focused system today, or you want a powerful drop-in upgrade for a Skylake-based system that you've already invested in, the smart move at this point would probably be to wait a few months (or possibly less) to see what AMD launches with its first line of Zen parts. The company seems primed to compete with Intel at a level it hasn't in the last five years or more. And as good as it is in a big-picture sense, the Core i7-7700K doesn't substantially move the goalposts in terms of performance or price from what we first saw with the Core i7-6700K back in the summer of 2015.

Intel Core i7-7700K
4.0
Pros
  • Fastest CPU available.
  • Hardware support for HDR and 4K streaming.
  • Modest overclocking improvements.
Cons
  • Minimal speed upgrade over previous-generation flagship Core i7 chip.
The Bottom Line

Intel's "Kaby Lake" Core i7 flagship is speedy, with hardware support for 4K streaming and HDR for services like Netflix, but performance gains over its previous-generation counterpart are fairly minimal.

Like What You're Reading?

Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.


Thanks for signing up!

Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!

Sign up for other newsletters

TRENDING

About Matt Safford

Matt is a self-described Net nerd, gadget geek, and general connoisseur of off-kilter culture. A graduate of the first class of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, his work has appeared in Popular Science, Consumer Reports, Smithsonian, and elsewhere in the ether. You'll often find him writing while walking on his treadmill desk, surrounded by heaps of consumer tech. (But really, he prefers the low-tech scenery of the Scottish Highlands and the hills of Japan.)

Read Matt's full bio

Read the latest from Matt Safford

Intel Core i7-7700K $250.00 at Amazon
See It