An Introduction

Core i5 7640X
Running a budget quad core processor on enthusiast class X299

In this review we'll show you the performance the  quad core Core i5 7640X from Intel offers. This 242 USD Kaby Lake-X processor is the the most affordable one for the X299 platform. But without hyper-threading / SMT how will it perform?

In this article we'll have a look at a new Core X series processor from Intel, the Core i5 7640X . With the introduction of Ryzen and more recently the announcement of Threadripper processors the processor market and channel has been turned up-side down. It gave Intel a serious awakening call and as such they needed to step up, significantly. Intel’s primary processor business has been releasing and refreshing quad-core processors for like a gazillion years now with the spicy prices E type (e.g. Broadwell-E / Haswell-E) processor release every now and then. You can't really blame them either as there was no competition - hence they had no rush and have been relaxed all the way for years now. Intel did anticipate Zen (or Ryzen), but the AMD consumer aimed Threadripper 16-core and Naples server segment 32-core made Intel step up its game a notch. Initially it was expected that Intel would announce a new 10 and maybe 12-core processor based on Skylake-X architecture. With everything that has been going on, there now has been a number of announcements going from top to bottom with an unexpected quad-core Kaby-Lake-X release as well as announcements that entails Intel to release 18-core processors. There’s more to the story than that as Intel might simply have been trying to steal some of the AMD Threadripper momentum. Yes, first the Skylake-X processors are going to be released but take good note, you will not see any availability for the 18, 16, 14 or even 12-core parts. Skylake-X will launch up-to 10-cores only with an uncertain release date for the higher-specced parts, there even is a rumor that the 18-core 2000 USD flagship might not see retail availability until 2018. 

Then for X299 Intel released another series of processors, this series however is based up-on the Kaby Lake architecture, with some slight tweaks it is revamped to that Kaby Lake-X series with the Core i7 7740X and Core i5 7640X. This article will not be as in-depth as other review, this is simply a performance overview of what Core i5 7640X has got to offer.