Hey guys, Jarrod here and today we’re going to compare the Intel Skylake 6700HQ CPU against
the newer Kabylake 7700HQ.
We’ll run some benchmarks to see how they perform, and discuss the differences between
them to help you find out which you should get.
First let’s note the similarities between these two chips.
Both have 4 CPU cores with 8 threads, are based on a 14nm manufacturing process, they
also have the same 45W TDP with 6MB of cache available.
Both CPUs support up to 64GB of RAM with 2 memory channels, and provide 16 PCI Express
lanes.
That’s where the majority of important similarities ends, so how do they differ?
The main difference is that the older 6700HQ is clocked slightly lower, at 2.6GHz and can
turbo up to 3.5GHz, while the newer 7700HQ is clocked at 2.8GHz and can turbo up to 3.8GHz.
How much of a performance difference does this make practically?
To test this we’ve run some CPU specific benchmarks on two different laptops with these
processors to find out.
Both laptops are running Windows 10 with all available updates installed on an SSD, and
have 16GB of DDR4 RAM @ 2400MHz, apart from the differences in graphics cards, the main
difference is the CPUs which is what we’re testing, so the laptops are pretty simialr
otherwise.
In Cinebench the CPU score for the 6700HQ was 691, while the 7700HQ received 740, so
only a small improvement but an improvement nonetheless.
In the PassMark CPU benchmark the 6700HQ got a CPU score of 8,973, interestingly the 7700HQ
got a score of 8,820 which is actually slightly lower.
I ran this test multiple times with the same result, the newer CPU came behind the older
CPU in terms of overall score on this test consistently.
Despite this if we actually look at the numbers for each individual test, in almost all cases
the 7700HQ comes out slightly in front, so it seems like the way this particular benchmark
generates the final overall score is a bit strange.
In GeekBench 4 the 6700HQ got 4,334 for single core, and 13,066 for multi-core.
The 7700HQ got 4,402 for the single core score, and 12,293 for the multicore score.
This was another interesting test, although the single core performance of the 7700HQ
is higher as expected, the multicore performance was slightly behind in this specific test.
Again this depends on what the test actually does behind the scenes, however in this instance
the 7700HQ was slightly slower in the multicore test which I found quite interesting.
The 7-Zip benchmark was run for 10 passes with a dictionary size of 32mb.
The 6700HQ got a total rating of 19,121MIPS, while the 7700HQ got a total rating of 19,602MIPS,
so the 7700HQ was slightly faster at compression tasks here, though barely.
I then used Handbrake to encode a 500mb MP4 video file that I recorded from 1080p to 720p.
The 6700HQ completed the job at an average speed of 35.084 FPS, while the 7700HQ completed
encoding the same file at 37.928 FPS.
The 7700HQ was only slightly faster in the encoding test.
In most of the tests, the 7700HQ was ahead of the 6700HQ, however I still found these
results quite interesting.
These two CPU’s also have inbuilt graphics, and while I don’t expect anyone to buy these
CPUs for their inbuilt graphics, it’s worth comparing them to see if there are any differences.
I’m going to leave this for a future video though, as my test results are actually showing
the older 530 graphics in the 6700HQ outperforming the newer 630 graphics in the 7700HQ in every
test that I throw at it, so some more investigation is required there first.
Based on these tests the 7700HQ appears to only be a very small incremental upgrade,
which I figured would be the case after watching a bunch of 6700K and 7700K benchmark reviews,
however I wanted to test these laptop chips as I didn’t see anyone else doing it and
I was curious.
It’s a bit disappointing too, as the 6700HQ was released in Q3 of 2015 while the 7700HQ
came out in Q1 of 2017, so despite being quite a lot newer it’s not that much better.
I didn’t notice any practical difference between using the two laptops with either
of these CPUs, so if you’re looking at a new laptop the 6700HQ is definitely still
fine, as the newer version only offers extremely small performance improvements, at least in
the workloads that were tested here.
By all means if your new laptop has a 7700HQ CPU, go for it, but if you’re looking at
one that has a 6700HQ then it’s definitely still a good competitor and might be cheaper
now due to it being last generation.
If the prices are similar then I’d suggest going for the newer 7700HQ, otherwise you’ll
need to determine if the extra cost is worth it based on the small performance increased
that we’ve measured in our tests here.
If you’re already running a 6700HQ there’s basically no incentive to upgrade to the next
generation unless you need to buy a new laptop anyway for other reasons.
Unless something drastically changes within the CPU area in the near future, you probably
won’t need to upgrade your laptop in terms of CPU power for quite some time.
So what did you guys think about the differences in performance between the 6700HQ and 7700HQ
CPUs from Intel?
Personally I’d like to see something better from Intel next generation, but I’m not
expecting much at the moment.
Who knows maybe AMD will finally shake up the scene with Ryzen.
Be sure to let me know your thoughts down in the comments, and leave a like on the video
if you found it useful.
Thanks for watching, and don’t forget to subscribe for future videos like this one.