Core i9-7900X Review - Fact-Checking Intel

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhaving received the ire of the community for its product stack Intel today sets forth in an attempt to validate the challenged existence of its x299 platform new Skylake X and new kbl Lake X CPUs we're starting with the 10 core 20 thread core I9 7900x which is Intel's new $11,000 CPU that takes place of the 1700 i 76950 x 10 core CPU this is a significant price drop over time but Intel is no longer competing with only itself Skylake X's precipitous launch lands between ryzen and thread Ripper due out in early August and today we're looking at game streaming VR benchmarks Premiere blender and other benchmarks of the new I9 7900x before that this is brought to you by corsair's Vengeance RGB memory which uses Bend ic's for higher overclocks and uses the SM bus to write its colors rather than relying on cables learn more at the link in the description below let's start by revisiting some of our earlier 7900x discussions from when we deleted the CPU at compx first of all that RFID chip in the corner we got some clarification on that that chip is actually not capable of storing data because its SM boss is not physically connected so it could do something if it were connected but on the HDT CPUs it is not and the reason that RFID chip is there at all on the package is because Intel is using the same package for its server versions of these CPUs as it is for the HDT versions of these CPUs and that just means that it's kind of a leftover because again same package for both types of products but it's not physically connected so that's good in some ways though it could potentially provide functionality could also provide things like back doors and we don't have to worry about that at all because you just can't read or right to or from the RFID chip on the package but that also bleeds into the next point which is the really interesting substrate design of the 7900x when we delited the CPU we showed that the CPU almost resembles an LGA 115 5x substrate at top the 2066 substrate Intel couldn't answer why the design is like this citing quote manufacturing reasons which is the same reason they site really for anything like use of thermal paste rather than solder and our present hypothesis having not seen the server CPUs is that the server CPUs might use more of the lower substrate and ditch the upper substrate part the protrusion but Intel is keeping the same package for everything really not sure if there's a legitimate technical reason for this Approach at this time if it's more of a cost-saving thing as Intel just wouldn't tell us as for the CPUs themselves our current understanding is that the 14 core 16 core and 18 core CPUs will be based on the same silicon from a 20 core CPU with some of them disabled or removed we're not sure 100% about the lower end skes like the 7900x which is a 10 core part but we do know some about the die size because of that delting process earlier so the 7900x measures in at roughly 334 mm squar some rounding invol D and for reference the previous generation 10 core to 24 core Parts ranged from 246 mm squ up to 456 mm squar in the Enterprise division respectively but anyway the substrate design is genuinely interesting hopefully we'll learn more one day at some point we do know it uses thermal paste probably dowo Corning and no solder for this one even though it is a larger D we'll look into The Thermals in a completely separate video because there's frankly enough for today we're not going to spend time going over a brochure with specs on it that's not really the point of these if you want that you can check the table on the website the 7900x is under test today and is used with the Asus Prime Deluxe x299 motherboard for full testing methodology again check the article Linked In the description below we're focusing on game streaming benchmarks including single and dual stream output simultaneously VR benchmarks to validate Intel's own marketing language as we figure a few others will bother with VR benchmarks and then dive into to the production workloads we're saving some stuff for later like thermals and power because we're up against deadlines overclocking will also be discussed in more depth in the article since overclocking results were still rolling in as we filmed this video starting with streaming benchmarks this is the first time we've ever done this type of benchmarking for actual game streaming via OBS and so it's exciting but there's also still a lot to develop methodologically and a lot to develop in presentation method there's a ton of data it's not necessarily easy to figure out how to display it so there's there's more to come later but for now we have a baseline we're using two main tests one is exporting to a single stream just twitch via OBS at 6 megabits per second 1080p 60fps with h264 encoding and then second we're streaming to both twitch and YouTube simultaneously so you've got dual stream output from the same box that's playing the game and that's done with the same settings for twitch but with 10 megabits per second for YouTube rather than six cuz it's supports a higher bit rate and finally we do have an extra FPS Baseline Benchmark without streaming and another Benchmark with Envy encoder or the GPU accelerated encoding rather than CPU so we can get a baseline for everything else and all the other Mana options in the system in addition to the FPS numbers we're using logging to measure what we're calling delay frames and drop frames another term that we use for VR benchmarking for these we've got usual frame time and frame rate metrics for the host system game output to the player and then the drop frames and delay frames are used for the viewers so that you get an understanding of what the actual quality is going out delay frames happen when the CPU can't complete the encode in time to hit its roughly 16.67 millisecond window before the next refresh and so this tends to be indicative of more of a GPU limitation we can run into these with high-end CPUs if we are running into a GPU limit because the CPU can keep up fully a drop frame however is indicative of in this scenario a CPU encoding issue where uh the CPU is actually just skipping the frame or dropping it entirely so you end up with sort of almost micro stutter in the absolute worst case scenario if you're dropping 50% or more of your frames and that is just because the CPU is getting overwhelmed which will certainly happen at some point as you pile on more simultaneous encoding streams because the CPU can't keep up with the workload and we'll talk about more of this going through it but we're starting with the R7 1800x and the I9 7900x of course both in stock configuration both with 3200 MHz memory and for full testing methods again on the new Benchmark check the article below it'll answer all the stuff in more detail let's start with a single stream first as it's the most common use case streaming the twitch only we saw no drop frames on the 7900x and no drop frames on the 1800x both are adequate performers with delay frames not noteworthy or perceptibly different between the two here's look at the differences in terms of frame rate the I9 7900x posts an in-game frame rate of 104 FPS average 79 FPS 1% lows and 31 FPS 0.1% lows with the R7 1800x sustaining 96 FPS average 68 FPS 1% low and 27 FPS 0.1% lows let's put a chart on the screen below this one this chart now that you can see both of them shows the performance when there's no streaming at all with just the game being tested Standalone in its same windowed configuration because again it's a stream Benchmark and we're doing AB testing we're going from 112 FPS average to 104 on the I9 7900x when compared to no streaming and with the 1800x we're going from 109 FPS average to 96 FPS with the twitch stream going the frame Time Performance is significantly improved when we stop streaming as you can see in the low numbers and justifies why you would still want a separate capture machine for really Competitive Gaming or games where frame time variability can affect your ability to play competitively moving on now to our next chart we're looking at streaming performance when going to both twitch and YouTube simultaneously there's a lot of data to process here so we're just going to start with the chart of twitch performance when streaming to both services and then look at YouTube as well these tests are meant to illustrate performance when outputting two destinations like when the user has an audience on both platforms and is becoming increasingly popular and is traditionally done with a separate capture machine to alleviate load on the gaming machine so we're going to see if that's still needed here here's the chart performance to Twitch during this dual stream Benchmark post 0.13% drop frames on the i9700 to X averaged across multiple test passes of the same duration which is largely imperceptible to both the viewer and the player delay frames are 5.03% which we think but we're still learning as this is new testing is because the CPU is performing well enough to bump into GPU limit the 1800x has a much harder time with this workload amd's 1800x is dropping 54% of its frames to Twitch which results in something of a slideshow for playback for comparison Envy encoder is still choppy for about 20% of its playback on the 10 80 with the 7900x even with two EnV encoder engines running so generally speaking CPU encoding is still going to be preferable when you can get away with it but that's clearly not always the case adding the YouTube chart to the page now the I9 7900x sticks to well below 1% of total frames dropped with GPU frame lag still around the same level AMD sees about 78% of its frames dropped here and struggles with the h264 profile and dual stream outputs to make things easier to understand we're putting the actual stream footage that went to YouTube on the screen now showing the 7900x next to the 1800x again remember that while this is going on we're also exporting to Twitch so there are two encoders going on simultaneously one for each stream the extra four threads really help Intel in this specific use case but just for sake of understanding performance here's a screenshot of utilization on the ryzen system and the Intel system when under this intense workload and again this is h264 with the encoder set to faster rather than very fast so you could lower your quality and possibly still sustain it but it would be a bit rough on the ryzen CPU as for FPS this is what it looks like the stack chart shows an average FPS of all three tests we're down to 75 FPS average on the 1800x still fine if it weren't for the stream struggling anyway and 89 FPS average on the 7900x now we're faced with the challenge of analyzing what this means the first big disparity is in frame time so the average FPS on both AMD and Intel in this very specific test looks just fine when you're streaming really to any of those two scenarios what doesn't show up in averages is what we see in frame 0.1% lows in this case or we do have a frame time chart as well and that is the case that the CPUs get over 70 FPS and 0.1% lows in our charts when there is no stream going on and then they fall below 30 or around 30 when streaming is happening which is not really the best case scenario especially if you're trying to stream something like csgo that will get you killed but for a lot of other games that might be just fine so it's something where it's going to vary on a game by game basis whether that's acceptable to you depends on what kind of content you're working with anyway this Frame time chart shows the Dual streams versus no stream on the I 9790071 is what we're seeing here with all that detailed a few notes the Intel I9 7900x is an impressive CPU for this dual streaming use case scenario certainly if you must stream to two sources simultaneously and if you cannot build a secondary capture machine then this isn't a bad solution in fact a $1,000 CPU the 7900 X may actually be cheaper than building a dedicated capture machine in addition to the gaming machine but you still lose performance in frame time so for people who are ultra competitive we'd still suggest building a secondary capture machine if you have the space and the budget to do it if that's absolutely out of the question then this CPU gets you closer but still outputting to just one stream is the best middle ground between them ryzen does well with single stream performance here and does dominate in the price to Performance argument versus the 7900x by quite a lot particularly considering you could buy an r7700 instead of the 1800x which we would certainly recommend because the 1800x is Superfluous you could overclock the 1700 and get the same performance or better than the 1800x out of box and that way you could run a cheaper solution than the 7900x stream your One Source twitch or YouTube and really do quite well in the price performance Market but to be fair to Intel the 7900x does crush everything in the Dual streaming test so far so that's not to say r7s couldn't do it you just really have to lose quality to do so both CPUs have their place just depends on what you're doing let's move on to another set of harder benchmarks this is VR testing we debuted our VR testing methodology in our r7700 versus i77700 K VR benchmarks where we noted that the CPUs were imperceptibly different from one another you would absolutely not be able to confidently tell the difference in a blind test and if you didn't see our previous VR test we'd strongly recommend watching those for a full description of how this procedure works because it's quite complicated and the most complicated benchmarking we've ever done not going to re-explain it all here but the real reason to reintroduce these benchmarks now is to validate some of Intel's marketing slides that we publicly disagreed with in the initial news announcement about these products in their slides Intel would lead you to believe that their existing nonk skew still high-end CPUs are insufficient for VR Gaming that's plainly false in fact Oculus Rift officially recommends recommends not requires recommends an i5 4590 CPU or better there's no K on there the HTC 5 recommends the same Hardware and in our own testing you would do fine with an i7 non kcq with really pretty much any game you could throw at VR so these slides served more of a point to find a way to say VR it does VR it does it really well rather than actually say that this is the capabilities of each of these products Intel is cannibalizing their own existing product line to make this one look better which we don't necessarily agree with uh so we benchmarked it to see what the performance would actually look like in an objective VR test since those really are still quite rare because it's hard to do uh and it's kind of interesting results but maybe not surprising now the main point here is going to be to compare the 7700 K to the 7900x seen as we're really just validating Intel's own slides but we do have 1,700 Benchmark numbers as well if you want the hardware capture from the capture machine which is extra complexity check the article we're going to do just software here let's look at Elite dangerous versus the 7 7700k shown in blue the i77700k technically outperforms the 7900k here and that should be somewhat expected it's got a clock Advantage which is often more beneficial than a thread advantage and generally speaking VR games don't really have the best multi-threaded programming right now that said the difference is again imperceptible the two CPUs are effectively identical in actual perceived performance but if you are buying for VR Gaming and nothing else this shows that clearly the 7900x is not only unnecessary VR but technically closer to the 11 to 13 millisecond frame time cutof off point before entering into drop frame or warp Miss territory the 7700k meanwhile stays closer to 9 millisecond average frame times again with a 90 HZ interval we need to hit that 11 to 13 millisecond frame time Target prior to the runtime kicking in and applying warps and finalizing animation and now just for a quick showcase here's the 7900x and the r7700 in stock configuration the 7900x does indeed outperformed the r7700 which was also outperformed by the 7700 K but between all three of these none of them are really running past the runtime in any meaningfully different way in fact we've got a better way to display this data so here's a bar charge for elite dangerous with average FPS in terms of delivered frames to the hmd we're seeing a perfect 90 HZ on all headsets a simple extrapolation of unconstrained frames pegs the I9 7900x below the 7700k stock CPU but the difference is again not noticeable our dropped frames are still just nine out of 5,400 intervals so that's really not bad you are never going to see nine out of 5400 whatever percentage that may be in this type of scenario AMD 1700 also does well here really all of these CPUs are fine and so there's no need for a $1,000 7900x to do this VR workload though Intel tells us that it wasn't just marketing for VR Gaming it was also for VR content creation except that's not what the slide said so that's not what we're benchmarking right now here's a look at Elite dangerous average frame times in milliseconds the I9 7900x runs an average frame time of 9.35 milliseconds plus or minus 0.25 as there's some variance in these tests that's below the 7700k for which our stock and OC numbers are effectively identical and are within our error bars and just ahead of the 1700 OC with dirt rally now we see a similar experience the I9 7900x is technically slower in frame times in this interval plot than the 7700k both stock though the two are realistically again imperceptibly different the I9 7900x would be a Monumental waste of money for VR Gaming considering that Intel's own i77700k is still the best performer we've seen or tested for Virtual Reality by this interval plot and frame time chart the 7900x is again technically better than the r7700 but again it's not noticeable and the 7700 K is still technically better than both at this particular workload here are some more bars since people seem to find that more palatable the 7900x lands middle of the pack none of these CPUs are bad they all provide 90 fps to the hmd but again it's not worth spending ,000 when two $ 300ish CPUs from either Camp including Intel's own can provide the same or better experience and that's an objective measurement as for frame times briefly the 7900x lands at 8.15 milliseconds average between the 8.7 millisecond average of the overclock 1700 and the 7.41 millisecond average of the 7700k performance is good but it's not better than Intel's other products or amd's other products that we've tested and that's fine the CPU does not have to do everything the best and that's what we want to convey to the marketers of the world we had the same talk with amd's R71 1800x when they boasted all kinds of gaming things like 4K gaming this and that we talked about all of that then and the point's not to pick on anyone the point wasn't to pick on AMD then the point is not to pick on Intel now even though it seems to be cool frankly the point is is that Intel you don't have to BS people if you have a good product it does fine at the things it does fine at as we'll see in a moment and as we saw in streaming a second ago but advertising this as a VR Gaming best of platform is not only wrong when your own products do better although they are all basically the same uh it's unnecessary and it's trying to bandwagon onto a phrase two letters that Intel clearly thinks will sell more products but but all this really does is produce more marketing BS that harms the companies because it's it's just unnecessary and there's I mean that's really all I have to say about it I guess despite the marketing the thing is not any better at VR Gaming than other CPUs we've tested and just Intel it's okay you don't have to be the best at every single thing let's move on to more suitable tasks for this type of processor using gn's in-house blender scene including optimizations for rendering on CPUs or gpus as appropriate we found the 7900x effortlessly chart tops all other tested products when it's stock configuration the 7900x completed the scene render in 21.5 minutes using its 20 threads to render 20 tiles simultaneously for the 4K scene this is the first CPU we've tested that managed to outperform a GTX 1080 with Cuda rendering and that's counting 256 x 256 GPU optimized tile sizes the 7900x improves over the stock 6900 K i7 CPU by nearly 8 minutes or a 26% reduction in time required that's massive generationally and the more competitive pricing of Intel's modern 10 core part tells us that it was Folly to expect Intel didn't have anything to compete that said the r7700 overclock the 3.9 GHz comes closer to competing with its 28 minute render time with the 7900x about 23% faster than the $310 part regardless there's no denying Intel's lead here for Production Studios that have the budget and would kill for the extra render time the CPU is a winner at its price ryzen though should give everyone pause on pricing if absolute top end production isn't the objective and the buyer is more of an Enthusiast or artist without a studio budget the r seven CPUs can be overclocked to compete quite reasonably and would still be a good buy for much cheaper they are ultimately a completely different class of hardware for this type of thing though particularly with x299 memory advantages over ryzen so this is one of those scenarios where it just depends on who has the money and who's paying for the product moving to Adobe Premiere we're still slower than Mercury Accel ation with Cuda but we're seeing steady improvements overall using our EVGA icx review from February to render which includes dozens of Clips in various states of post production we find the I9 CPU completing the software render in 54 minutes or about 7.8% time reduction from the overclock 6900k and 21% reduced time required from the stock 6900k that's a decent jump and the R7 CPUs complete the render at about 62 minutes when overclocked even the 7900x with a 133% Time reduction from the overclocked r7s though with a higher price of course so again trade off of if you're a studio or an individual that's not great value for the average end user given the $700 price hike but it's something that again a production house would consider then again for this type of Premier workload you're really significantly better off with a GTX 1080 and Cuda anyway we're at 20 minutes for those renders even with an i5 CPU Premier just doesn't care about the CPU if it's given ample GPU to work with cinebench and synthetic tests will be in the article below moving on to some games total war war hammerson update post rise and launch that improved performance significantly on both AMD and Intel processors Intel saw a major uptick in frame time consistency reflected in our 0.1% lows and AMD saw a major uptick in smt enabled performance CPUs with an asterisk have been retested with this update while CPUs without an asterisk have not been retested CPUs without the star would see an improvement of a couple percent in average FPS if retested stock the I9 7900x operates at 168 FPS average placing it behind the i57600k and ahead of the 6900k stock CPU and ahead of the overclocked 1700x CPU with overclocked ram the stock i77700k CPU ranks at around 190 FPS average where we begin bumping into GPU limitations which illustrates why HT CPUs aren't really meant for gaming despite some of their advertising some games will use the threads but many are still frequency intensive first Battlefield 1 also got an update after ryzen's launch moving to version 1.08 and improving CPU bottom line performance again the asterisks on the items mean that they have been retested the I9 7900 X run 144 FPS average placing it roughly tied with the $330 7700 K CPU and better yet the $240 7600k CPU the r7700 X with overclocked core and memory speeds runs 136 FPS average marking the 7900x about 5.7% faster not a huge gain we also have gaming benchmarks for ashes and Watchdogs 2 Linked In the article below with the synthetics each of the conclusions for the different things was kind of self-contained in its section but to go over it briefly here the CPU is impressive for multistream output it does really well and outputting two streams to YouTube and to Twitch ryzen does pretty well with one stream to the point where you really wouldn't need a 7900 X there's not a huge difference at that point but for two this is the best thing we've tested it's just a matter of is that a use case you will encounter and also is it better for you to just build a separate Stream box the reason you would do it again is if you want the lower frame time variance for competitive games if you don't care about that then this is a cheaper alternative to building two complete systems for the most part for VR Gaming this is a Monumental waste of money and you should buy something else for production work like Premiere or blender is even a better example in blender there were big enough gains that the 7900x could be worthwhile to people who do blender rendering and similar tasks professionally and who might want to do it on the CPU rather than the GPU although again if you start pumping 1080 TI into it the argument gets neb but for those people this is a good product at a good price for people who are more Enthusiast artists or nonproduction Studios AMD is a great competitor at the price that it's at looking at something like a 1,700 overclock you get really good and close performance Premier the performance is closer still in our testing you're better off with the GPU in our testing that's not the most conclusive because we can't test for every single use case but from what we've seen you're better off with a GPU anyway anyway so it's it's better than the other CPUs I guess but that's it for this one so plenty of other stuff in the article below as always you can support our testing like this and our new 4k camera which is eating 1 Gaby per minute right now uh if you go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus or you can buy a shirt like this when we're restocking triy Blends this week actually uh store. Gamers nexus.net and adding that part cost me about another gigabyte so thank you for watching subscribe for more I will see you all next timehaving received the ire of the community for its product stack Intel today sets forth in an attempt to validate the challenged existence of its x299 platform new Skylake X and new kbl Lake X CPUs we're starting with the 10 core 20 thread core I9 7900x which is Intel's new $11,000 CPU that takes place of the 1700 i 76950 x 10 core CPU this is a significant price drop over time but Intel is no longer competing with only itself Skylake X's precipitous launch lands between ryzen and thread Ripper due out in early August and today we're looking at game streaming VR benchmarks Premiere blender and other benchmarks of the new I9 7900x before that this is brought to you by corsair's Vengeance RGB memory which uses Bend ic's for higher overclocks and uses the SM bus to write its colors rather than relying on cables learn more at the link in the description below let's start by revisiting some of our earlier 7900x discussions from when we deleted the CPU at compx first of all that RFID chip in the corner we got some clarification on that that chip is actually not capable of storing data because its SM boss is not physically connected so it could do something if it were connected but on the HDT CPUs it is not and the reason that RFID chip is there at all on the package is because Intel is using the same package for its server versions of these CPUs as it is for the HDT versions of these CPUs and that just means that it's kind of a leftover because again same package for both types of products but it's not physically connected so that's good in some ways though it could potentially provide functionality could also provide things like back doors and we don't have to worry about that at all because you just can't read or right to or from the RFID chip on the package but that also bleeds into the next point which is the really interesting substrate design of the 7900x when we delited the CPU we showed that the CPU almost resembles an LGA 115 5x substrate at top the 2066 substrate Intel couldn't answer why the design is like this citing quote manufacturing reasons which is the same reason they site really for anything like use of thermal paste rather than solder and our present hypothesis having not seen the server CPUs is that the server CPUs might use more of the lower substrate and ditch the upper substrate part the protrusion but Intel is keeping the same package for everything really not sure if there's a legitimate technical reason for this Approach at this time if it's more of a cost-saving thing as Intel just wouldn't tell us as for the CPUs themselves our current understanding is that the 14 core 16 core and 18 core CPUs will be based on the same silicon from a 20 core CPU with some of them disabled or removed we're not sure 100% about the lower end skes like the 7900x which is a 10 core part but we do know some about the die size because of that delting process earlier so the 7900x measures in at roughly 334 mm squar some rounding invol D and for reference the previous generation 10 core to 24 core Parts ranged from 246 mm squ up to 456 mm squar in the Enterprise division respectively but anyway the substrate design is genuinely interesting hopefully we'll learn more one day at some point we do know it uses thermal paste probably dowo Corning and no solder for this one even though it is a larger D we'll look into The Thermals in a completely separate video because there's frankly enough for today we're not going to spend time going over a brochure with specs on it that's not really the point of these if you want that you can check the table on the website the 7900x is under test today and is used with the Asus Prime Deluxe x299 motherboard for full testing methodology again check the article Linked In the description below we're focusing on game streaming benchmarks including single and dual stream output simultaneously VR benchmarks to validate Intel's own marketing language as we figure a few others will bother with VR benchmarks and then dive into to the production workloads we're saving some stuff for later like thermals and power because we're up against deadlines overclocking will also be discussed in more depth in the article since overclocking results were still rolling in as we filmed this video starting with streaming benchmarks this is the first time we've ever done this type of benchmarking for actual game streaming via OBS and so it's exciting but there's also still a lot to develop methodologically and a lot to develop in presentation method there's a ton of data it's not necessarily easy to figure out how to display it so there's there's more to come later but for now we have a baseline we're using two main tests one is exporting to a single stream just twitch via OBS at 6 megabits per second 1080p 60fps with h264 encoding and then second we're streaming to both twitch and YouTube simultaneously so you've got dual stream output from the same box that's playing the game and that's done with the same settings for twitch but with 10 megabits per second for YouTube rather than six cuz it's supports a higher bit rate and finally we do have an extra FPS Baseline Benchmark without streaming and another Benchmark with Envy encoder or the GPU accelerated encoding rather than CPU so we can get a baseline for everything else and all the other Mana options in the system in addition to the FPS numbers we're using logging to measure what we're calling delay frames and drop frames another term that we use for VR benchmarking for these we've got usual frame time and frame rate metrics for the host system game output to the player and then the drop frames and delay frames are used for the viewers so that you get an understanding of what the actual quality is going out delay frames happen when the CPU can't complete the encode in time to hit its roughly 16.67 millisecond window before the next refresh and so this tends to be indicative of more of a GPU limitation we can run into these with high-end CPUs if we are running into a GPU limit because the CPU can keep up fully a drop frame however is indicative of in this scenario a CPU encoding issue where uh the CPU is actually just skipping the frame or dropping it entirely so you end up with sort of almost micro stutter in the absolute worst case scenario if you're dropping 50% or more of your frames and that is just because the CPU is getting overwhelmed which will certainly happen at some point as you pile on more simultaneous encoding streams because the CPU can't keep up with the workload and we'll talk about more of this going through it but we're starting with the R7 1800x and the I9 7900x of course both in stock configuration both with 3200 MHz memory and for full testing methods again on the new Benchmark check the article below it'll answer all the stuff in more detail let's start with a single stream first as it's the most common use case streaming the twitch only we saw no drop frames on the 7900x and no drop frames on the 1800x both are adequate performers with delay frames not noteworthy or perceptibly different between the two here's look at the differences in terms of frame rate the I9 7900x posts an in-game frame rate of 104 FPS average 79 FPS 1% lows and 31 FPS 0.1% lows with the R7 1800x sustaining 96 FPS average 68 FPS 1% low and 27 FPS 0.1% lows let's put a chart on the screen below this one this chart now that you can see both of them shows the performance when there's no streaming at all with just the game being tested Standalone in its same windowed configuration because again it's a stream Benchmark and we're doing AB testing we're going from 112 FPS average to 104 on the I9 7900x when compared to no streaming and with the 1800x we're going from 109 FPS average to 96 FPS with the twitch stream going the frame Time Performance is significantly improved when we stop streaming as you can see in the low numbers and justifies why you would still want a separate capture machine for really Competitive Gaming or games where frame time variability can affect your ability to play competitively moving on now to our next chart we're looking at streaming performance when going to both twitch and YouTube simultaneously there's a lot of data to process here so we're just going to start with the chart of twitch performance when streaming to both services and then look at YouTube as well these tests are meant to illustrate performance when outputting two destinations like when the user has an audience on both platforms and is becoming increasingly popular and is traditionally done with a separate capture machine to alleviate load on the gaming machine so we're going to see if that's still needed here here's the chart performance to Twitch during this dual stream Benchmark post 0.13% drop frames on the i9700 to X averaged across multiple test passes of the same duration which is largely imperceptible to both the viewer and the player delay frames are 5.03% which we think but we're still learning as this is new testing is because the CPU is performing well enough to bump into GPU limit the 1800x has a much harder time with this workload amd's 1800x is dropping 54% of its frames to Twitch which results in something of a slideshow for playback for comparison Envy encoder is still choppy for about 20% of its playback on the 10 80 with the 7900x even with two EnV encoder engines running so generally speaking CPU encoding is still going to be preferable when you can get away with it but that's clearly not always the case adding the YouTube chart to the page now the I9 7900x sticks to well below 1% of total frames dropped with GPU frame lag still around the same level AMD sees about 78% of its frames dropped here and struggles with the h264 profile and dual stream outputs to make things easier to understand we're putting the actual stream footage that went to YouTube on the screen now showing the 7900x next to the 1800x again remember that while this is going on we're also exporting to Twitch so there are two encoders going on simultaneously one for each stream the extra four threads really help Intel in this specific use case but just for sake of understanding performance here's a screenshot of utilization on the ryzen system and the Intel system when under this intense workload and again this is h264 with the encoder set to faster rather than very fast so you could lower your quality and possibly still sustain it but it would be a bit rough on the ryzen CPU as for FPS this is what it looks like the stack chart shows an average FPS of all three tests we're down to 75 FPS average on the 1800x still fine if it weren't for the stream struggling anyway and 89 FPS average on the 7900x now we're faced with the challenge of analyzing what this means the first big disparity is in frame time so the average FPS on both AMD and Intel in this very specific test looks just fine when you're streaming really to any of those two scenarios what doesn't show up in averages is what we see in frame 0.1% lows in this case or we do have a frame time chart as well and that is the case that the CPUs get over 70 FPS and 0.1% lows in our charts when there is no stream going on and then they fall below 30 or around 30 when streaming is happening which is not really the best case scenario especially if you're trying to stream something like csgo that will get you killed but for a lot of other games that might be just fine so it's something where it's going to vary on a game by game basis whether that's acceptable to you depends on what kind of content you're working with anyway this Frame time chart shows the Dual streams versus no stream on the I 9790071 is what we're seeing here with all that detailed a few notes the Intel I9 7900x is an impressive CPU for this dual streaming use case scenario certainly if you must stream to two sources simultaneously and if you cannot build a secondary capture machine then this isn't a bad solution in fact a $1,000 CPU the 7900 X may actually be cheaper than building a dedicated capture machine in addition to the gaming machine but you still lose performance in frame time so for people who are ultra competitive we'd still suggest building a secondary capture machine if you have the space and the budget to do it if that's absolutely out of the question then this CPU gets you closer but still outputting to just one stream is the best middle ground between them ryzen does well with single stream performance here and does dominate in the price to Performance argument versus the 7900x by quite a lot particularly considering you could buy an r7700 instead of the 1800x which we would certainly recommend because the 1800x is Superfluous you could overclock the 1700 and get the same performance or better than the 1800x out of box and that way you could run a cheaper solution than the 7900x stream your One Source twitch or YouTube and really do quite well in the price performance Market but to be fair to Intel the 7900x does crush everything in the Dual streaming test so far so that's not to say r7s couldn't do it you just really have to lose quality to do so both CPUs have their place just depends on what you're doing let's move on to another set of harder benchmarks this is VR testing we debuted our VR testing methodology in our r7700 versus i77700 K VR benchmarks where we noted that the CPUs were imperceptibly different from one another you would absolutely not be able to confidently tell the difference in a blind test and if you didn't see our previous VR test we'd strongly recommend watching those for a full description of how this procedure works because it's quite complicated and the most complicated benchmarking we've ever done not going to re-explain it all here but the real reason to reintroduce these benchmarks now is to validate some of Intel's marketing slides that we publicly disagreed with in the initial news announcement about these products in their slides Intel would lead you to believe that their existing nonk skew still high-end CPUs are insufficient for VR Gaming that's plainly false in fact Oculus Rift officially recommends recommends not requires recommends an i5 4590 CPU or better there's no K on there the HTC 5 recommends the same Hardware and in our own testing you would do fine with an i7 non kcq with really pretty much any game you could throw at VR so these slides served more of a point to find a way to say VR it does VR it does it really well rather than actually say that this is the capabilities of each of these products Intel is cannibalizing their own existing product line to make this one look better which we don't necessarily agree with uh so we benchmarked it to see what the performance would actually look like in an objective VR test since those really are still quite rare because it's hard to do uh and it's kind of interesting results but maybe not surprising now the main point here is going to be to compare the 7700 K to the 7900x seen as we're really just validating Intel's own slides but we do have 1,700 Benchmark numbers as well if you want the hardware capture from the capture machine which is extra complexity check the article we're going to do just software here let's look at Elite dangerous versus the 7 7700k shown in blue the i77700k technically outperforms the 7900k here and that should be somewhat expected it's got a clock Advantage which is often more beneficial than a thread advantage and generally speaking VR games don't really have the best multi-threaded programming right now that said the difference is again imperceptible the two CPUs are effectively identical in actual perceived performance but if you are buying for VR Gaming and nothing else this shows that clearly the 7900x is not only unnecessary VR but technically closer to the 11 to 13 millisecond frame time cutof off point before entering into drop frame or warp Miss territory the 7700k meanwhile stays closer to 9 millisecond average frame times again with a 90 HZ interval we need to hit that 11 to 13 millisecond frame time Target prior to the runtime kicking in and applying warps and finalizing animation and now just for a quick showcase here's the 7900x and the r7700 in stock configuration the 7900x does indeed outperformed the r7700 which was also outperformed by the 7700 K but between all three of these none of them are really running past the runtime in any meaningfully different way in fact we've got a better way to display this data so here's a bar charge for elite dangerous with average FPS in terms of delivered frames to the hmd we're seeing a perfect 90 HZ on all headsets a simple extrapolation of unconstrained frames pegs the I9 7900x below the 7700k stock CPU but the difference is again not noticeable our dropped frames are still just nine out of 5,400 intervals so that's really not bad you are never going to see nine out of 5400 whatever percentage that may be in this type of scenario AMD 1700 also does well here really all of these CPUs are fine and so there's no need for a $1,000 7900x to do this VR workload though Intel tells us that it wasn't just marketing for VR Gaming it was also for VR content creation except that's not what the slide said so that's not what we're benchmarking right now here's a look at Elite dangerous average frame times in milliseconds the I9 7900x runs an average frame time of 9.35 milliseconds plus or minus 0.25 as there's some variance in these tests that's below the 7700k for which our stock and OC numbers are effectively identical and are within our error bars and just ahead of the 1700 OC with dirt rally now we see a similar experience the I9 7900x is technically slower in frame times in this interval plot than the 7700k both stock though the two are realistically again imperceptibly different the I9 7900x would be a Monumental waste of money for VR Gaming considering that Intel's own i77700k is still the best performer we've seen or tested for Virtual Reality by this interval plot and frame time chart the 7900x is again technically better than the r7700 but again it's not noticeable and the 7700 K is still technically better than both at this particular workload here are some more bars since people seem to find that more palatable the 7900x lands middle of the pack none of these CPUs are bad they all provide 90 fps to the hmd but again it's not worth spending ,000 when two $ 300ish CPUs from either Camp including Intel's own can provide the same or better experience and that's an objective measurement as for frame times briefly the 7900x lands at 8.15 milliseconds average between the 8.7 millisecond average of the overclock 1700 and the 7.41 millisecond average of the 7700k performance is good but it's not better than Intel's other products or amd's other products that we've tested and that's fine the CPU does not have to do everything the best and that's what we want to convey to the marketers of the world we had the same talk with amd's R71 1800x when they boasted all kinds of gaming things like 4K gaming this and that we talked about all of that then and the point's not to pick on anyone the point wasn't to pick on AMD then the point is not to pick on Intel now even though it seems to be cool frankly the point is is that Intel you don't have to BS people if you have a good product it does fine at the things it does fine at as we'll see in a moment and as we saw in streaming a second ago but advertising this as a VR Gaming best of platform is not only wrong when your own products do better although they are all basically the same uh it's unnecessary and it's trying to bandwagon onto a phrase two letters that Intel clearly thinks will sell more products but but all this really does is produce more marketing BS that harms the companies because it's it's just unnecessary and there's I mean that's really all I have to say about it I guess despite the marketing the thing is not any better at VR Gaming than other CPUs we've tested and just Intel it's okay you don't have to be the best at every single thing let's move on to more suitable tasks for this type of processor using gn's in-house blender scene including optimizations for rendering on CPUs or gpus as appropriate we found the 7900x effortlessly chart tops all other tested products when it's stock configuration the 7900x completed the scene render in 21.5 minutes using its 20 threads to render 20 tiles simultaneously for the 4K scene this is the first CPU we've tested that managed to outperform a GTX 1080 with Cuda rendering and that's counting 256 x 256 GPU optimized tile sizes the 7900x improves over the stock 6900 K i7 CPU by nearly 8 minutes or a 26% reduction in time required that's massive generationally and the more competitive pricing of Intel's modern 10 core part tells us that it was Folly to expect Intel didn't have anything to compete that said the r7700 overclock the 3.9 GHz comes closer to competing with its 28 minute render time with the 7900x about 23% faster than the $310 part regardless there's no denying Intel's lead here for Production Studios that have the budget and would kill for the extra render time the CPU is a winner at its price ryzen though should give everyone pause on pricing if absolute top end production isn't the objective and the buyer is more of an Enthusiast or artist without a studio budget the r seven CPUs can be overclocked to compete quite reasonably and would still be a good buy for much cheaper they are ultimately a completely different class of hardware for this type of thing though particularly with x299 memory advantages over ryzen so this is one of those scenarios where it just depends on who has the money and who's paying for the product moving to Adobe Premiere we're still slower than Mercury Accel ation with Cuda but we're seeing steady improvements overall using our EVGA icx review from February to render which includes dozens of Clips in various states of post production we find the I9 CPU completing the software render in 54 minutes or about 7.8% time reduction from the overclock 6900k and 21% reduced time required from the stock 6900k that's a decent jump and the R7 CPUs complete the render at about 62 minutes when overclocked even the 7900x with a 133% Time reduction from the overclocked r7s though with a higher price of course so again trade off of if you're a studio or an individual that's not great value for the average end user given the $700 price hike but it's something that again a production house would consider then again for this type of Premier workload you're really significantly better off with a GTX 1080 and Cuda anyway we're at 20 minutes for those renders even with an i5 CPU Premier just doesn't care about the CPU if it's given ample GPU to work with cinebench and synthetic tests will be in the article below moving on to some games total war war hammerson update post rise and launch that improved performance significantly on both AMD and Intel processors Intel saw a major uptick in frame time consistency reflected in our 0.1% lows and AMD saw a major uptick in smt enabled performance CPUs with an asterisk have been retested with this update while CPUs without an asterisk have not been retested CPUs without the star would see an improvement of a couple percent in average FPS if retested stock the I9 7900x operates at 168 FPS average placing it behind the i57600k and ahead of the 6900k stock CPU and ahead of the overclocked 1700x CPU with overclocked ram the stock i77700k CPU ranks at around 190 FPS average where we begin bumping into GPU limitations which illustrates why HT CPUs aren't really meant for gaming despite some of their advertising some games will use the threads but many are still frequency intensive first Battlefield 1 also got an update after ryzen's launch moving to version 1.08 and improving CPU bottom line performance again the asterisks on the items mean that they have been retested the I9 7900 X run 144 FPS average placing it roughly tied with the $330 7700 K CPU and better yet the $240 7600k CPU the r7700 X with overclocked core and memory speeds runs 136 FPS average marking the 7900x about 5.7% faster not a huge gain we also have gaming benchmarks for ashes and Watchdogs 2 Linked In the article below with the synthetics each of the conclusions for the different things was kind of self-contained in its section but to go over it briefly here the CPU is impressive for multistream output it does really well and outputting two streams to YouTube and to Twitch ryzen does pretty well with one stream to the point where you really wouldn't need a 7900 X there's not a huge difference at that point but for two this is the best thing we've tested it's just a matter of is that a use case you will encounter and also is it better for you to just build a separate Stream box the reason you would do it again is if you want the lower frame time variance for competitive games if you don't care about that then this is a cheaper alternative to building two complete systems for the most part for VR Gaming this is a Monumental waste of money and you should buy something else for production work like Premiere or blender is even a better example in blender there were big enough gains that the 7900x could be worthwhile to people who do blender rendering and similar tasks professionally and who might want to do it on the CPU rather than the GPU although again if you start pumping 1080 TI into it the argument gets neb but for those people this is a good product at a good price for people who are more Enthusiast artists or nonproduction Studios AMD is a great competitor at the price that it's at looking at something like a 1,700 overclock you get really good and close performance Premier the performance is closer still in our testing you're better off with the GPU in our testing that's not the most conclusive because we can't test for every single use case but from what we've seen you're better off with a GPU anyway anyway so it's it's better than the other CPUs I guess but that's it for this one so plenty of other stuff in the article below as always you can support our testing like this and our new 4k camera which is eating 1 Gaby per minute right now uh if you go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus or you can buy a shirt like this when we're restocking triy Blends this week actually uh store. Gamers nexus.net and adding that part cost me about another gigabyte so thank you for watching subscribe for more I will see you all next time\n"