Intel Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K, i7-7700, i5-7600K, i5-7600 Review

Results: DTP And Multimedia

We're often asked which CPU or graphics card is best for intensive Adobe CC workloads, and we're ready to answer the question as far as CPUs are concerned.

Once again, we leave the provisioning and automation of the benchmarks, as well as the computation of the geometrical mean (GEOMEAN), to PCMark 8 Professional.

Adobe Photoshop CC (64 Bit)

We have two different Adobe Photoshop benchmarks to run. The top of the chart stays the same, but the lower rungs change places depending on the workload. We start with the light version.

Using additional functions, which includes output in different compressed file formats, puts even more strain on the hardware. Taken together, the two tests provide a fairly complete picture of any bottlenecks that would be encountered in daily usage. The filters used here don’t include GPU acceleration, which means that we're measuring CPU and platform performance.

We don't see the usual order due to the Core i7-7700’s surprisingly bad performance. We repeated the benchmark run several times, but, for whatever reason, the result stayed the same. Still, the differences are tiny. None of the CPUs, not even AMD’s FX-9590, are actually slow.

Adobe InDesign CC (64 Bit)

Adobe InDesign emphasizes IPC throughput, as evidenced by its sensitivity to clock rate. It’s interesting that the Kaby Lake CPUs end up being slower than the corresponding Skylake models at the same frequencies.

Adobe Illustrator CC (64 Bit)

For Adobe Illustrator, CPU and storage performance are the deciding factors. The hardware’s particularly important when it comes to writing operations.

Adobe After Effects CC

Adobe After Effects is able to schedule tasks like vector conversion in parallel. This is reflected in the results from CPUs with SMT that achieve better multi-threading performance, placing them above their competition. Uncompressed AVIs drive home the point that a higher clock rate can compensate for the lack of SMT.

Bottom Line

Adobe CC doesn’t demand a CPU with SMT at this point. In the end, any good quad-core processor will do, with the largest gains observable from high IPC throughput and clock rates. Processors that can hit even higher clock rates via Turbo Boost/Core across four cores have an advantage.

A direct comparison shows that Kaby Lake CPUs aren’t any faster than Skylake CPUs at the same clock rate. It’s actually the opposite in some situations, with the Skylake CPUs edging out Intel’s new processors. In order to achieve this, the older CPUs first need to be manually overclocked, though.