Core i7-8700K Review: Coffee Lake Brews A Great Gaming CPU

[IceMyth]

So let me get this right, so the difference is margin between AMD & Intel new CPU. But why 1800x and then say in the conclusion Intel offer better price/core while 1700 and 1700x cost away less and can both hit same performance as 1800x. But honestly, I was expecting that, every article written by PAUL has Intel taste and smell in it no matter what AMD offers!

For diagrams in Conclusion section, I would take Unboxing hardware ones which are away more legit and reasonable.

 

[saunupe1911]

I just read that the coffee lake boards aren't backward compatible with sky/kaby CPU's??

Is this right ??
It doesn't sound right to me :-/ ?!?!

If that's true that is maybe the biggest FU to current skylake / kaby lake CPU owners that Intel could possibly have managed.

That's correct sir!

 

[Crashman]

AMD's price per core is still very strong. It struggles in gaming at 1080p but Tomshardware didn't provide data in 1440p or 4K.

I'm not yet convinced that AMD is in trouble.

Edit: This post has acquired a list of down votes from the community.
For the record: my analysis of the situation is ON POINT. It's objective AND insightful.
The only part that could be considered opinion is: "I'm not yet convinced that AMD is in trouble." It's optimistic towards AMD and isn't inflammatory.

You know how this works. The pompous Intel-only guys think anything positive that's said on AMD's behalf is rude and give you a downvote. On the other hand, some AMD fans have gone into Intel review threads using multiple usernames just to revenge-downvote nearly every post that supports the reviewer's findings

 

[FormatC]

This thing looks like big paper launch. The big three online shops in Germany had only 50(!) i7-8700K, sold out within seconds. No info about the next delivery.

Talked today with a sales guy from a big shop and he is really sad. Intel destroyed their business. Who will buy now this tons of outdated Z270 boards?

 

[saunupe1911]

This thing looks like big paper launch. The big three online shops in Germany had only 50(!) i7-8700K, sold out within seconds. No info about the next delivery.

Talked today with a sales guy from a big shop and he is really sad. Intel destroyed their business. Who will buy now this tons of outdated Z270 boards?

Whoa....I didn't even put that into perspective....sheesh. Z270 boards will just collect dust

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

I'd like to point out how crucial the advances in Turbo boost have been for this release. Everyone has maintained that Intel could/should have increased core count prior to this. Adding cores to an existing architecture has always meant a reduction in clocks and lower single thread performance. It's beyond impressive that they were able to up core counts without sacrificing ST for all but the i3's. That's completely due to Turbo boost. Imagine if XFR had been able to match the aggressive per-core clocks of Turbo boost. Erase every single "disappointing gaming performance" comment in all the reviews.

 

[InvalidError]

I just read that the coffee lake boards aren't backward compatible with sky/kaby CPU's??

It has been officially known for over a month (the box art for the new CPUs specifically says so) and strongly suspected for a year. Intel hasn't shared sockets/chipsets between more than two CPU generations since Intel ever got into the VLSI chipset business, which means nobody should have ever expected Coffee Lake to be compatible with motherboards designed around a two generations old system socket.

People who bought LGA1156/1366 motherboards had a more legitimate reason to get upset about their motherboards only being good for a single generation of CPUs, same goes for people who bought 9x-series motherboards hoping to upgrade to Broadwell with Broadwell ending up overpriced, under-performing in many cases and nearly impossible to buy.

 

[InvalidError]

Talked today with a sales guy from a big shop and he is really sad. Intel destroyed their business. Who will buy now this tons of outdated Z270 boards?

Shouldn't be stocking tons of anything in the first place, that's what killed many brick-and-mortar shops that made the mistake of over-stocking PC parts during the .com bubble. Most companies today aim for Just-in-Time supply chains to avoid having large unsold inventory of parts that can drastically depreciate overnight.

Retailers have a 40-60% markup on most goods. Your 'big shop' should have plenty of margin to afford z270+SL/KL CPU bundles to help clear inventory before 370-series motherboard and CL become broadly available if it is that nervous about being stuck with large unsold inventory of obsolete parts.

 

[MaCk0y]

Can you benchmark a couple of games that are GPU bottleneck at lower graphic settings? Especially BF1 MP 64 players matches, even though in the MP there will be variance, it would still be very useful to compare between 4 core and six core processors in that game.

 

[saunupe1911]

Talked today with a sales guy from a big shop and he is really sad. Intel destroyed their business. Who will buy now this tons of outdated Z270 boards?

Shouldn't be stocking tons of anything in the first place, that's what killed many brick-and-mortar shops that made the mistake of over-stocking PC parts during the .com bubble. Most companies today aim for Just-in-Time supply chains to avoid having large unsold inventory of parts that can drastically depreciate overnight.

Retailers have a 40-60% markup on most goods. Your 'big shop' should have plenty of margin to afford z270+SL/KL CPU bundles to help clear inventory before 370-series motherboard and CL become broadly available if it is that nervous about being stuck with large unsold inventory of obsolete parts.

Yeah but it still doesn't help the B&M stores as a whole. I really don't care for ordering from Newegg or Amazon. I want to see stuff in person, ask questions, see a variety, and even most importantly quickly return faulty products so I can get my rig back going. I live in Dallas, TX. Guess what? We got 2 Frys and 1 Microcenter to get PC parts from. Every other shop has died due to business practices like this. Think of it this way...Those shops are the reason why even visit this site. We want to read/preview it here and then go buy!

 

[logainofhades]

Given the overall cost of the platform, I would still recommend Ryzen to most of the more budget constrained crowd. Great CPU, but steep price overall, due to the Z370 chipset being the only option. Once we get some more budget friendly motherboard options, things may not be so clear cut, though.

 

[madmatt30]

I just read that the coffee lake boards aren't backward compatible with sky/kaby CPU's??

It has been officially known for over a month (the box art for the new CPUs specifically says so) and strongly suspected for a year. Intel hasn't shared sockets/chipsets between more than two CPU generations since Intel ever got into the VLSI chipset business, which means nobody should have ever expected Coffee Lake to be compatible with motherboards designed around a two generations old system socket.

People who bought LGA1156/1366 motherboards had a more legitimate reason to get upset about their motherboards only being good for a single generation of CPUs, same goes for people who bought 9x-series motherboards hoping to upgrade to Broadwell with Broadwell ending up overpriced, under-performing in many cases and nearly impossible to buy.

Well , A massive disagreement from me mate honestly on that front.

They've not renamed the socket,Its still socket 1151 ,same as h110,h170,h270,b150,b120 ,z270

Ensuring huge amounts of mass confusion & misguided future purchases for someone who isnt that tech savvy.

Whether deliberate or not thats the biggest facepalm this century for intel.

There is no reason whatsoever that the coffee lake boards couldnt have been backwards compatible ,
Extra pins required ? (not that there are but there coould have been) non issue,amd managed it through 7 different chipsets.
Stick them on a leading edge (even provide a plastic template for older kaby/skylake cpu's to stop idiots managing to misalign them at all which would have cost what ? $1)
Thats the sign of a rushed & non thought out release.

No physical reason they couldnt have offered backward compatibility ,apart from touting down to tdp requirements (which is non sensical becuase the draw on the coffee lake chips is actually higher) it should have been an easy process.

If you dont see it as any kind of issue for current skylake/kaby lake owners we are on a different wavelength.

This isn't a new socket,its in an intermediate update of an existing socket.
Backward compatibility should have been a given imo.

'40-60%' markup ?? No,thats not even close to being true for smaller retailers ,more like 20-25% because they cant buy in huge bulk amounts.

Even a couple of hundred boards on the shelves is a lot of money to a smaller business.

 

[samer.forums]

all what AMD needs to do now is releasing a 6 cores threadripper CPU for $350

 

[madmatt30]

all what AMD needs to do now is releasing a 6 cores threadripper CPU for $350

Well no,that wouldn't make any sense at all.
The 8700k would still crucify it for gaming only.

& the 1700 is $70 less (with a cooler so essentially $200 less) & does a decent job of gaming with streaming & production work already.

The 8700k is going to sell to people who don't have limited budgets ,who have $600 G-sync monitors & $700 gpu's
Value for money doesnt matter to that contingent at all.

 

[samer.forums]

I really love the i7 8700 (non K)

it can turbo all cores upto 4.3Ghz .. and it is a 65 watts CPU. Personally I dont need overclocking much after this. 4.3 all cores is more than enough and lower TDP is welcomed.

time to put the money on more memory and more SSD instead of $300 motherboard and $150 cooling.

This CPU is crazy , I can Passive cool 65 watt CPU EASY and still get 4.3GHz 6 cores ? WOW

 

[InvalidError]

They've not renamed the socket,Its still socket 1151 ,same as h110,h170,h270,b150,b120 ,z270

The Coffee Lake LGA1151 socket has ~20 pins re-assigned from 'reserved' to Vcc core and ground as its most obvious and quite significant. It may be physically the same but it is electrically different. Putting extra Vcore pins near the socket's edge wouldn't work as all of the socket and most of the CPU substrate bypass capacitors are located in the middle of the socket and under the CPU die, which means Vcore pins need to be mostly on the inside to be most effective at reducing power delivery impedance.

Should Intel have made Coffee Lake LGA1152 or some other such thing to avoid all of the potential confusion and misplaced optimism from reusing the same socket name? Sure. But it is too late for that.

At any rate, any so-called enthusiast should have seen it coming as it is a ~20 years old trend.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

Of course, while Intel's accelerated Coffee Lake-S launch makes it look today's unveiling is a direct response to heated competition, in reality, the long incubation period for new processors means it’s more likely the result of 10nm manufacturing delays.

Ummm... Yeah, the design may have been kicking around, and ready to go before Ryzen, but when it is released months earlier than scheduled.... Saying that it wasn't a response to Ryzen seems more like misinformation more than pure fact. Yeah, I don't doubt 10nm manufacturing delays played a part in the previous release date, but Ryzen forced its release a little earlier than planned.

Agreed. We touched on that in the conclusion.

 

[saunupe1911]

They've not renamed the socket,Its still socket 1151 ,same as h110,h170,h270,b150,b120 ,z270

The Coffee Lake LGA1151 socket has ~20 pins re-assigned from 'reserved' to Vcc core and ground as its most obvious and quite significant. It may be physically the same but it is electrically different. Putting extra Vcore pins near the socket's edge wouldn't work as all of the socket and most of the CPU substrate bypass capacitors are located in the middle of the socket and under the CPU die, which means Vcore pins need to be mostly on the inside to be most effective at reducing power delivery impedance.

Should Intel have made Coffee Lake LGA1152 or some other such thing to avoid all of the potential confusion and misplaced optimism from reusing the same socket name? Sure. But it is too late for that.

At any rate, any so-called enthusiast should have seen it coming as it is a ~20 years old trend.

Ok so with all that being said...Would you buy it if you already own SkyLake 6700K or KabyLake 7700K????? That's basically what it boils down to.

 

[samer.forums]

all what AMD needs to do now is releasing a 6 cores threadripper CPU for $350

Well no,that wouldn't make any sense at all.
The 8700k would still crucify it for gaming only.

& the 1700 is $70 less (with a cooler so essentially $200 less) & does a decent job of gaming with streaming & production work already.

The 8700k is going to sell to people who don't have limited budgets ,who have $600 G-sync monitors & $700 gpu's
Value for money doesnt matter to that contingent at all.

I meant with higher clocks , The Threadripper is huge and I think a 6 cores Threadripper can reach higher clocks easier .

 

[TJ Hooker]

They've not renamed the socket,Its still socket 1151 ,same as h110,h170,h270,b150,b120 ,z270

Ensuring huge amounts of mass confusion & misguided future purchases for someone who isnt that tech savvy.

Whether deliberate or not thats the biggest facepalm this century for intel.

How is this different than LGA 2011? It may be annoying, but it's not unprecedented as you seem to be making out.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

I don't understand why the conclusion keeps bringing up you needing to buy a motherboard if you want to use your new cpu. Especially when comparing it to AMD. Is AMD giving away free motherboards with the purchase of a Ryzen CPU? You're going to have to buy a new motherboard regardless of which cpu you decide to go with.

Yup. You will have to buy a new motherboard if you step up, but with AMD they guarantee that motherboard will work with all new processors until 2020. That's a long time in the dog years of processors.

OTOH, Intel already has Z390 boards in the works for the middle of next year. We have no idea on the compatibility matrix for that, so it may be another wash/rinse/repeat of buying a new motherboard. You don't get a guarantee of compatibility like AMD, so it's a relevant point.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

Why no comparison to Intel's other 6-core processors? It would seem a logical "like vs. like" comparison to include.

7800X is 6C/12T. It's in the test results.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

"Intel reminds us, though, that it offers up to 40 lanes when we add the platform controller hub's 24. "

Please, stop. Don't let Intel get away with another twist of PR terminology, it's incrediby misleading (you should remind Intel the only thing connecting the chipset to the CPU is a single DMI 3.0 link). No way would any review of CPUs years ago have added the chipset lanes to those from the CPU, other reviewers and people on the forums would have scorned such a notion. Have a chat with Ian at AT about this, he has a strong position on the PR spin of adding lanes together in this way for marketing.

Ian.

Agreed. That is why we list the lanes as x16 in all of our tables and comparisons. Also, note that we explicitly call out the DMI 3.0 bottleneck on page 2.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

So let me get this right, so the difference is margin between AMD & Intel new CPU. But why 1800x and then say in the conclusion Intel offer better price/core while 1700 and 1700x cost away less and can both hit same performance as 1800x. But honestly, I was expecting that, every article written by PAUL has Intel taste and smell in it no matter what AMD offers!

For diagrams in Conclusion section, I would take Unboxing hardware ones which are away more legit and reasonable.

The 1800X offers the best performance, so that is putting AMD's best foot forward.

The lower-priced SKUs have much lower base clock rates, so they are slower at stock. If you overclock, the 1700's are getting into 1800X performance territory, but the difference is still huge at stock.

Take a look at the difference between 1700 at stock and OC here (from our best CPU article). Compare the stock 1700 to the stock 1800X.

If we used the 1700 readers would likely cry foul that we are misrepresenting AMD's performance at stock. What you perceive as bias is the exact opposite.

Or, as we wrote it in the conclusion...

After all, you can get Ryzen 7 1800X-class performance out of an overclocked Ryzen 7 1700 for $300 or less.

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

Best thing going for Coffee Lake and gaming is the i5-8400 for price/performance. We're back to "all you need for gaming is an i5."