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Civilization VI & Battlefield 1
Civilization VI AI Test
Clock rate and IPC throughput tend to win the day in this test, so it isn't surprising to find both Core i7s vying for supremacy.
It was less expected to find the 10-core Core i9-7900X mixing it up. Surely, a tuned Core i7-7700K would be faster at 4.9 GHz, right? The new Skylake-X model likely benefits from to its reworked cache hierarchy.
Again, the differences are slight between Kaby Lake-X and Kaby Lake-S. They're such similar processors, after all.
Civilization VI Graphics Test
Speaking of the -7900X's reworked cache hierarchy, as we noticed in our initial review, the processor does suffer from mesh-imposed performance limitations in some titles. That comes into play during this benchmark.
The 10-core Broadwell-E-based chip leads, but both tuned Core i7s are competitive with the rest of our contenders. The difference between Core i7-7700K and -7440X is negligible at stock settings, and therefore unnoticeable during gameplay. But the -7740X's extra bit of frequency headroom yields a larger delta when we overclock.
Battlefield 1 (DX11)
Our armor-laden walk through the O La Vittoria scene in Battlefield 1 yields large performance variations when we test less-powerful processors. The differences shrink as we benchmark higher-end CPUs, mostly because we're graphics-bound.
We encountered an almost-predictable variance between the two Core i7s in most tests, and that plays out in Battlefield 1 when we measure the stock configurations. A 0.2 FPS delta is simply imperceptible.
The story changes with the application of a robust overclock, though. Try as we might, we simply could not get Intel's -7740X to match the -7700K in an overclocked state. That's particularly baffling due Kaby Lake-X's higher overclocked frequency. Nevertheless, the results for both overclocked Core i7s are repeatable, so it's possible that BIOS updates or chipset drivers could improve performance down the road.
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