How is the AMD 7700K?

[NewYorksFinest]

How are the new AMD Kaveri CPUs? This one costs $150 with graphics based on the AMD R9 series. How is this CPU, gaming + speed wise?

 

[Yuriman]

Kaveri's CPU is a little faster per clock but clocked lower than Richland due to a process change. Overall it's a net improvement, though a small one. The 7700K has 384 shaders, while the 7850K has 512 shaders, but (presumably) due to memory bandwidth limitations they're going to perform very close to the same, which is going to be somewhere between intel's graphics and a 7750 (which is arguably the lowest end discrete gaming GPU). It's basically 3/4 of a 7750 with very limited and shared memory bandwidth.

Check out Anand's review of the 7850K and 7600: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k

EDITED.

 

[FalseChristian]

By looking at these benchmarks I don't really think it matters. My i5 2500K's 3000 doesn't even register 1 fps!

 

[Yuriman]

I think it's quite reasonable to play 3-4 year old games at medium to high settings smoothly. The CPU is fast enough as to give a fine general desktop experience. Since you don't have a discrete card, you cut down on noise and can build a smaller form factor. That's its niche.

For the same price, you can't get a discrete CPU of similar performance + a discrete GPU of similar performance, but for little more you can get a lot more performance, though not in the same form factor.