Alien: Isolation

If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled.

Alien Isolation on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)Alien Isolation on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)Alien Isolation on MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB ($245)Alien Isolation on MSI R9 285 Gaming 2GB ($240)

In al of our testing, aside from a couple of scores falling at the bottom depending on the CPU/GPU combo, all the CPUs perform similarly.

Legacy Tests Gaming: Total War Attila
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  • RichUK - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    Very thorough review, thank you!

    Shame you didn't get a better sample.

    Will you look to do a focused review around delidding and the associated overlooking benefits?
  • RichUK - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link

    That's should read 'overclocking' - Damn auto correct on my phone!
  • close - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Yeah... great review that calls a CPU that's basically identical to the previous generation as "The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion". While mathematically it can be considered true I think such a title is grossly misleading.

    Intel brought almost 0 improvements over generations but didn't bother dropping the price accordingly. This isn't "the new champion", this is last year's CPU a little overclocked. The fact that it comes "pre-overclocked" doesn't make it a champion nor does it make the title and conclusion of this article any more valuable.

    We'll see how Zen does but if it offers similar performance to Intel's offerings for substantially less money a lot of journalists will have to backtrack on their "Intel's having a hard time advancing performance because there's no more headroom and prices can't go down due to research and fabrication costs".
  • close - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Also this: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/intel-core-...

    Arstechnica's conclusions:
    "With identical performance to Skylake, Intel brings desktop performance to a standstill."
    "the Kaby Lake desktop chips are but a mere clock speed boost disguised under the nomenclature of a new CPU generation. From an IPC standpoint, there's nothing to tell Kaby Lake apart from Skylake"

    AnandTech's conclusions:
    "The New Champion"
    "The Core i7-7700K sits at the top of the stack, and performs like it."
    "handily mops the floor with the Devil’s Canyon part [nb, 3 year old part!], resigning it to history."

    Intel are selling yesterday's soup, reheated but at the same price and Ian is trying hard to make everyone think that soup is like wine, it gets better with age. The truth is that there's basically no reason whatsoever to upgrade this year since we're still talking about a 6700K with 200MHz. *ANY* user buying a K part should be able to achieve that with last year's CPUs.
  • close - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    P.S. Devil's Canyon is actually a 4 year old part that was overclocked and relaunched 3 years ago. So it's "refreshing" to see how AnandTech gets excited about a brand new CPU that manages to be ~10% faster than a 4 year old CPU with slightly lower (boost) clocks in office/workstation scenarios and which brings 0 benefits in gaming scenarios. That would be a ~5% average improvement for a user.

    Wow Ian, it really doesn't take much to get you all hyped up these days, does it?
  • Lolimaster - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Anandtech was a shill site for a long time, Kaby Lake was going to prove whose site is that. Doubts answered.
  • pogostick - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    The best line is the first line: "The Intel Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying."
  • slickr - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link

    Yeah, very suspicious of Ian. Is he getting paid to shill for Intel or is he that BAD at journalism!?
  • fanofanand - Thursday, January 26, 2017 - link

    As someone who has read Ian's work for years, he is no shill. I disagree with his politics, but he is a good, honest journalist. Was he overly generous in this piece? No doubt. Calling it a great overclocked then saying it only boosts 300 MHz was a giveaway there. I am quite certain purch wanted this to go out as a softer piece for the $$$$, so Ian disguised his contempt the best he could. Look for the clues, they are there. Only reason to go Kaby is if you really want an optane cache. He kind of made that clear I thought.
  • RichUK - Thursday, January 5, 2017 - link

    I skipped to the overclocking section and didn't read the rest. ;) That's all I'm interested in.

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