With a boost clock of 4.7GHz, the Core i7-8700K slides past the previous top dog, the Core i7-7700K which has a top boost clock of 4.5GHz. Intel actually dominates the single-threaded performance with 8th-gen, Kaby Lake and Skylake-X lining up in an orderly fashion ahead of the pack of older Intel CPUs and AMD’s chips.ĪMD fans will protest that single-threaded performance doesn’t matter in a multi-threaded world, but the harsh truth is a huge swath of applications and games don’t exploit more than one CPU core at a time. With Core i7-8700K (see the pink bar below), you get that in spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds.įor single-threaded tasks, the Core i7-8700K squeaks by the Core i7-7700K CPU to win the day. For the most part, such a test favors CPUs with higher clock speeds and greater efficiency. We also run Cinebench in single-threaded mode to measure the performance of a CPU when an app or game only uses one core. The Ryzen 7 1700X easily walks away from the Core i7-8700K, but if you have any doubts as to whether Core i7-8700K is better left to compete with AMD’s 6-core Ryzen 5 chips, the result above should answer that. In Cinebench, which scales very well with the number of cores, it comes very close to the performance of an 8-core. In multi-threaded tests, the new Core i7-8700K (the second orange bar in the chart above) straddles the line between the performance of a 6-core CPU and an 8-core CPU. The Cinebench R15 puts the 6-core Core i7-8700K between the 8-core and 6-core. From there the list sorts out nicely based on the number of cores and whether the CPUs have Symmetric Multithreading (SMT), or what Intel calls Hyper-Threading. In the crazy range, we have Intel’s Core i9 chips and AMD’s Threadripper. The multithreaded results bear this out, as the CPUs we’ve tested sort out based on the thread count. Professional 3D rendering tends to like CPU cores and threads, and the default setting for Cinebench exploits all available cores. It’s a popular, free benchmark based on the same engine used in the company’s professional Cinema 4D program. If you edit video or perform other CPU-intensive tasks on your PC, pay closer attention to the multi-threaded performance. If you use mostly Office applications, a browser and gaming, our single-threaded performance results matter more. To dig into the performance characteristics of Core i7-8700K, we ran the CPU through a gauntlet of rendering, encoding, and other productivity tests. The last, larger chip is a Kaby Lake X Core i7-7820X, which fits in the same socket as Skylake X. In the top middle is a Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake. Intel’s new 8th-gen Core i5-8600K (lower left) next to the 8th-gen Core i7-8700K (lower right.) On the top left is a Core i3-7350K Kaby Lake. In the end, we swapped in another pair of modules rated at 2,400MHz and got closer to the numbers Intel said we should expect. On the Intel side, we used a Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 board with a matching Founders Edition GeForce GTX 1080 card, a clean install of Windows 10, and the same model of Kingston SATA SSD for the primary boot drive.įor RAM, we initially used a matching set of 16GB DDR4/3200 from our Ryzen build. When calibrating our system against numbers provided by Intel, we found the system actually performed slower when selecting the XMP profile for 3,200MHz. This allows a user to overclock just individual cores based on the workload.įor GPU we again used a Founders Edition GeForce GTX 1080 card, updated with the latest Nvidia drivers. The higher-clocked RAM required more tightly controlled layout of the wires or “traces” on the motherboard, which mandated new designs.Ĭoffee Lake also adopts the nifty “per core” overclocking first introduced with the Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E. The first is official support for DDR4/2666 instead of of DDR4/2400. Why, Intel, why? The company cites several changes. The main one is its incompatibility with older motherboards, despite using the exact same physical LGA1151 socket. Why Coffee Lake requires a new motherboardĪlthough Coffee Lake is essentially an improved Kaby Lake CPU, some key changes will drive Intel fans simply batty. Here’s the full line up of “8th generation” CPUs from Intel. With Coffee Lake, you’re getting two more cores for the nearly the same price as Kaby Lake and Skylake. Consider that Intel once charged $1,000 for 6-core CPUs. So yes, cynics, the only true “8th-generational” part may be the name itself. Folks of a more forgiving mindset will see 8th-gen chips as a big breakthrough for Intel, which has offered quad-core CPUs as luxury models exclusively for the last ten years. Intel’s top mainstream CPUs alongside AMD’s fastest Ryzen 7 CPU.
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