It’s finally official. Intel has announced its high-performance quad-core Kaby Lake processors for desktops and notebooks and the first devices start flowing. Along with all the refreshes, which the OEMs will bring, some of them are pushing entirely new devices. Like in this case, Acer has officially released on the market the Aspire VX5-591G laptop. A sweet blend between a Predator and a V15 Nitro Black Edition laptop packing either a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or just GTX 1050.

Anyway, we are not here to talk about the GPU but about the CPU that powers up the notebook – the top of the line mobile quad-core processor – Intel Core i7-7700HQ. The new chip doesn’t bring any jaw-dropping performance leap, nor does it offer significantly lower power consumption. The new Kaby Lake CPU uses largely the same architecture as its Core i7-6700HQ Skylake predecessor built on the 14nm node but Intel stresses on the fact that the 7th Generation processors use the “much-improved” 14nm+ architecture.

This improvement translates into slightly higher clock speeds – 2.8 – 3.8 GHz vs 2.6 – 3.5 GHz compared to the Core i7-6700HQ, while keeping the same TDP of 45W. Of course, an incremental update is followed by an incremental performance leap and our benchmarks are here to prove it.

However, the Kaby Lake generation will be remembered with a significant iGPU upgrade in all of its Intel Core processors. We have a new decoding engine, better power efficiency and a slew of new features including 4K playback using the very latest codecs used in YouTube and Netflix. Either way, the Intel HD Graphics 630 update isn’t a good enough reason to update from the previous generation or even from a Haswell-powered PC, because let’s face it, if you own a high-performance laptop, the chances are it’s paired with a discrete graphics solution anyway.

You can find the Core i7-6700HQ-powered notebooks here: Buy from Amazon.com (#CommissionsEarned)
While the Core i7-7700HQ will start popping out here: Buy from Amazon.com (#CommissionsEarned)

Specifications

Benchmarks