Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Grand Theft Auto V, Hitman & Shadow of Mordor
Grand Theft Auto V
We measure performance during Grand Theft Auto V's F-16 flight sequence with the built-in benchmark.
Core i9-7900X boasts 25% more cores than Core i7-7820X, but due to the vagaries of scaling, it only enjoys a 12% performance advantage at stock clock rates. Still, that's pretty darned good in the world of CPU benchmarking. Both models easily outpace Core i7-6900K and AMD's Ryzen processors. Meanwhile, Core i7-7700K shows why we consider it to be a strong value in gaming PCs.
Hitman (2016)
Intel's Core i7-7700K beats the stock Core i7-7820X, which is an impressive feat considering their similar Turbo Boost frequencies. A bit of tuning propels the -7820X further up the chart, but the Core i9-7900X reigns supreme at both stock and overclocked settings. Tuning also greatly benefits the Ryzen 7 1800X, but it and the overclocked Core i9-7900X also suffer the most frame time outliers.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Once again, the Core i7-7820X bests a pricier -7900X. But the nimble Core i7-7700K outpaces both Skylake-X CPUs.
Broadwell-E serves as a baseline to underline Skylake-X's improved performance in applications able to utilize Intel's reworked architecture.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
30-year-old Pentium FDIV bug tracked down in the silicon — Ken Shirriff takes the microscope to Intel's first-ever recall
Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.2 claims to improve Arrow Lake performance by up to 33%, theoretically matching the Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Empyrean Technology gives control to CEC after U.S. blacklisting — China’s top developer of chip design systems hands reins to state-owned firm
