
Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K review - smacktoward
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/10/intel-coffee-lake-8700k-review/
======
kllrnohj
The title's enthusiasm is completely out of whack from the actual review.

From the cons section (and this is in line with other reviews of the chip)

"Coffee Lake is the third "optimisation" of an existing architecture with no
IPC improvement"

The performance gains exclusively come from the small bump in clock frequency
which you could trivially get with a minor OC on the previous gen(s), and from
2 extra cores in multithreading tests (no real impact to games currently).

If you're already in the market for a new CPU and motherboard it should be on
the short list. If you're not already in the market this won't make you want
to upgrade.

It also means the 2- & 4- core Coffee Lake chips have no redeeming qualities
over what came before, hardly a smashing success.

Side note it seems the author isn't even able to read their own charts? The
author lists as a con "The 8700K runs very hot and pulls a lot of watts" but
the 8700k was the lowest power consuming chip in the entire lineup that they
compared it against. It has a similar power consumption to the 7700k and comes
in at ~90w under load. That's peanuts for this category of CPUs.

~~~
dabockster
> with no IPC improvement

Unacceptable. It's now 5+ years since major improvements. And they released a
new socket too, breaking upgrade paths.

Meanwhile, my Ryzen 1600 is overclocked at 4ghz and running smoothly with 6
cores/12 threads.

Intel better release something worthwhile soon. AMD is well into its comeback.

~~~
RandomInteger4
This is a random tangent, but I've been meaning to build my first PC and was
thinking of going with Ryzen.

Do you by any chance run Linux or Linux dev tools on it and if so have you
experienced hard crashing issues that I've been reading about?

~~~
zanny
It was a manufacturing error they fixed on new CPUs after week 25. If you
bought one now, it would work fine.

~~~
kogepathic
So is it a new stepping? If so that would be remarkably fast for a bug to be
fixed in silicon.

Otherwise why couldn't AMD issue a microcode update to fix the issue on older
processors of the same stepping?

I guess I'm not understanding how it could be a silicon fix so quickly, or how
any other manufacturing defect on the package would cause such an issue.

------
danieldisu
So... great benchmarks but they couldn't even gain more than +2 average fps in
most games compared to last gen 7700.

The title makes you believe that it has some serious gains over previous gens
but nope. I wonder how much Intel paid for this review...

~~~
epmaybe
The title? "The best gaming CPU you can buy". Not sure how that indicates
"serious" gains, but you keep on telling yourself that Intel influenced them
into use that title.

~~~
vogon_laureate
ArsTechnica is hardly 'pop tech'. Their technical analysis is reliably high
calibre, they do excellent benchmarking and thorough testing, and they also do
some stellar long-form science journalism. I can't really see how you could
say that.

~~~
pitaj
Think you replied to the wrong person.

------
diab0lic
To call this "the best gaming CPU you can buy" is a bit disingenuous. A $379
processor which can turbo boost up to 4.7GHz is pretty impressive. It is
however still limited to 16 PCIe lanes which means you get one GPU at PCIe 3.0
x16 and are very limited in the additional expansion cards you can run. Sure
there are additional lanes for a single NVMe disk and the motherboard's
onboard components but:

Want to add a PCIe x1 wifi card? Your GPU now runs at 8x. Want to add a second
GPU? They're both running at 8x.

This is a pretty solid processor for the most common use case of single high
end GPU + everything else built into the motherboard (including wifi) but that
is far from the "best gaming CPU you can buy." I have friends who are going
threadripper for the additional PCIe lanes, I know it belongs in a different
price class but this is about the best CPU not the most cost efficient -- I
suspect this processor would not land in the best bang for buck category
either.

~~~
vbezhenar
What's the difference between x16 and x8 for gaming GPU? Textures will load
for 0.25 seconds instead of 0.125 seconds at startup? I was under impression
that there's virtually no gain for games with x16 compared to x8.

~~~
diab0lic
It seems you're right, at least as recently as last year [0] the difference
seems very negligible. I had read that it was in 2013 but had assumed
increases in GPU speeds exacerbated the effect.

[0]
[https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-pe...](https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-performance-
impact-on-gpus)

~~~
compton_effect
To add on, even pcie 3.0 x4 has plenty of bandwidth for a gtx 1080.

[https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_...](https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/25.html)

This is the same reason why nvidia didn't bother with HBM for the 10 series.
Those gpu's do not need that much memory bandwidth and in most cases GDDR5
provides plenty of bandwidth as it is.

------
zanny
Somewhat related, I wonder why the PC gaming ecosystem has always focused on
the extreme high end for _everyone_. I very rarely see anyone trying to get
into PC gaming considering a very reasonable $600 budget that would in real
world performance get them 90% of the way to a system twice as expensive.

Back in, say, 2008 the diminishing returns threshold was much higher. But
builders have never adapted to how good cheap parts are - games are being
designed for the average hardware, and nowadays that is _extremely_ old
relative to how it would have been ten years ago.

The real winners of Coffee Lake and Ryzen for me are the 8100 and 1200. Quad
cores with, respectively, high frequencies or an unlocked multiplayer on
almost all motherboards that come in under $120. These chips beat the pants
off an i5 2500k and until this year that kind of performance was barely
trickling down when suddenly it just windfalled as soon as AMD was competitive
again.

Same way the winners in the GPU market are either the 1060 or 580. At least
before the mining boom, they were both available under $200 and delivered
performance comparable to $500+ cards three years ago.

The real advent of recent years has not been pushing the envelope in terms of
tech - even the most ludicrous builds still cannot handle 4k and VR is still
in its infancy - it has been in driving the cost of admission to great looking
3d games at 1080p down to a fraction what it was five years ago.

I'm not sure what it will take to break that 4k barrier. Maybe once we are
near a _mature_ 5nm node we will be able to stuff enough transistors onto a
die to push that many pixels. But until then we should appreciate how
affordable PC gaming is becoming for anyone just getting into it. At least
when GPU prices come back down to Earth...

~~~
diab0lic
I just built a PC and tried to budget as cheaply as possible while still
retaining reasonable performance. It ended up costing $1200 (plus monitor,
another $200). I went with a Ryzen 3 1300x and a RX580. I'd love some feedback
about how I could have got the price down closer to $600 as I was disappointed
in myself for only being able to get it down to $1200 + monitor. That said the
performance is incredible.

[https://pcpartpicker.com/list/F87BCy](https://pcpartpicker.com/list/F87BCy)
(NOTE: The GPU price isn't added into the total as they don't seem to have a
value for it right now.)

~~~
zanny
GPUs are definitely overpriced right now, but just some basic arithmetic on
pricing a $600 ystem would be something like:

$110 CPU + $80 mobo + $60 for 8GB ram (you really don't need 16GB to play PC
games - just add some swap space if you are really paranoid, and RAM is still
overpriced) + $200 for a 580 at MSRP (whenever it gets back there) + $30 PSU
(entry level 450-550w bronze units often go on sales that low nowadays) + $30
case (I know at least the Coolermaster N200 sometimes hits $20-30 and is
solid). You can get a budget 22" 1080p monitor for about $85-90 nowadays, and
a 5 button mouse + media keyboard are usually only about $20. And there are
regularly ~250GB ssds for $80 as well, so the total is just under $700 with
peripherals.

I'd definitely say your mistakes were the monitor and ram. I was recently
shopping for all manner of monitors and generally the following price chart
applies:

22" 1080p TN for ~$90

24" 1080p TN for ~$110

22" 1080p IPS for ~$120

27" 1080p for $150

24" 1080p 144hz for $180

27" 144p 144hz for $250 (from Monoprice)

Anything beyond that is way overkill for gaming, especially 4k, which also
starts around $250. The monoprice monitor I mention goes on sale for $250
often and is an unbeatable deal, but the panel quality is lackluster so it
might take an RMA or two of that model to get one without a substantial number
of dead pixels. If you want to avoid that hassle more reliable monitors with
those specs start around $350 though.

For ram, that market is a mess too right now, but just like how i7s and 1080s
are overvalued in builds, so is 16GB of ram. Especially with an ssd,
_especially_ with an nvme drive, having 8GB of swap is not going to do
anything to performance. Same with memory frequency - it really does not
matter for gaming, especially not enough to consider spending more money for
higher frequency kits.

The rest is just waiting for a good sale rather than buying everything at
once, and its not like you would wait months, just watch /r/buildapcsales for
a few weeks and you can pick up a whole build on the cheap.

In your build, it is just nickle and dime differences per part that add up.
$20 more on each individual piece comes out to several hundred dollars total.

~~~
diab0lic
Thanks for the detailed response, I'll definitely pay closer attention to
sales on my next build. :D

------
throwaway2048
It would be a great CPU if you could buy it, it is very much a paper launch,
seems significant quantities wont be available until Q1/2 2018. No retailers I
checked have it in stock.

[https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/damien-cox/intels-
cof...](https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/damien-cox/intels-coffee-lake-
to-possibly-face-shortage/)

~~~
kpil
"The marginally better gaming CPU, that you can't buy until next year."

Not as catchy.

------
std_throwaway
More accurately: The best gaming CPU you _can 't_ buy.

~~~
std_throwaway
Edit: The title was edited and "The best gaming CPU you can buy." was removed.
Smart move.

------
bhouston
It seems like an out of the box overclocked 7700k with more cores. The article
says it can not really be further overclocked without liquid cooling. That
does suggest it is out of the box overclocked as compared to previous chips.
Does its hotness reduce its lifespan?

But that weirdness aside, nice to see the additional cores, that Intel stayed
at 4 cores for the desktop for so long has been unfortunate.

~~~
sddfd
> that Intel stayed at 4 cores for the desktop for so long has been
> unfortunate

That's why my next cpu will be AMD: Intel needs competition to stay sharp.

------
atom_enger
Does this remind anybody of Intel Pentium 4 Prescott?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Prescott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Prescott)

    
    
      Intel claimed that NetBurst would allow clock speeds of up to 10 GHz in future chips; however, severe problems with heat dissipation (especially with the Prescott Pentium 4) limited CPU clock speeds to a much lower 3.8 GHz

~~~
smitherfield
In what way?

~~~
GrumpyNl
The issue with heat.

~~~
olavgg
Yeah I wonder how hot it gets when doing matrix multiplications with numpy. My
i6700K starts throttling within a few seconds, with air cooling rated for
130w.

Though for gaming it is most likely a dream.

~~~
dom0
Heat dissipation has been problematic for Intel not just with the recent 2066
disaster but way before that. Most Haswell desktop processors are not that
easy to keep from throttling. This is exaggerated by large temperature
gradients of 15 °C and more across the cores, and obviously the hottest core
is limiting overall performance.

~~~
jandrese
The fact that you can significantly improve the thermals by delidding the
processor and replacing the TIM is really an embarrassment for Intel,
especially on >$200 chips.

------
snicky
If you are buying a CPU for gaming you would be better off with i5-8400 which
is half the price and performs equally well in most games. Oh, and it comes
with a stock cooler (8600k and 8700k don't).

~~~
MrMember
When did Intel stop including fans with some of their processors? The last
processor I bought was a k branded i5 in 2012ish and it came with a fan.

~~~
jandrese
It's just on the -K processors, because those are the one that are unlocked
for overclocking. If you're not planning to overclock there's no point in
paying more for the -K.

~~~
vbezhenar
K series provide faster boost rate, so they are faster without any
overclocking. Also overclocking voids warranty, so I'm not sure if many buyers
are really going to overclock it.

------
mtgx
Haven't read yet, but did they test for gaming stuttering, too, or just
synthetic benchmarks?

From what I've seen AMD's new Ryzen CPUs do better in maintaining a constant
framerate than Intel's CPUs, possibly because AMD's SMT implementation and the
switching between threads is better than Intel's.

Also this Intel CPU seems to run hot, which means this is a compromise Intel
made to be able to "win" these benchmarks. I wonder what sort of problems that
will create in the day to day use of it, or in the long term (dying more
quickly?)

Finally, like someone else said, this won't be available for purchase for most
people until early 2018. By then AMD's updated Ryzen CPUs should be out.
Strange that Intel would give out its chips almost half a year earlier for
review...

------
seanalltogether
It seems that most games are not cpu limited if you're anywhere under 80 fps.
You really have to crack into super high frame rates to bottleneck on the cpu.

~~~
vbezhenar
It's probably a truth, but I'm playing almost exclusively WoW and it's known
that even 7700K wasn't able to sustain 60 FPS in hard conditions, limited by
CPU single-thread. So for some games single-thread performance is all that
matters, unfortunately and it pushed into Intel direction if you want the best
configuration.

------
dom0
> Despite the similarities between Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake
> requires a new chipset to function.

Shamed be he who thinks evil of it. Intel would never, never I tell you, make
upgrading your mainboard a necessity, but there are just these stringent
technical requirements to replace PCIe-I/O-Expander and sell some extra
electronics garbage with every iteration.

------
walrus01
The more important news in my opinion is the cheapest core i3 in the price
range of $105 to $125, which is now quad core and reasonable budget
workstation competition for the also-quad-core Ryzen 1300X.

------
rocky1138
I think the biggest disadvantage to this chip is that it's not an upgrade path
for us i5/i7 6600/6700 CPUs due to a change in processor socket, requiring a
new motherboard.

~~~
wmf
Upgrading from Skylake to Basically Skylake is a waste of money anyway.

------
userbinator
It's odd that, despite the big emphasis on increased power consumption in the
review, the TDP is still specified as only 95W. I was expecting something much
higher, at least in the 130-140W range.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_figures#Intel_Core_i7)

~~~
trynumber9
In measurements it is often worse: [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-
coffee-lake-i7-870...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-coffee-
lake-i7-8700k-cpu,5252-12.html)

------
holtalanm
[http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i7-8700K-vs-...](http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-
Core-i7-8700K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X/3937vs3916)

i7 benchmarks higher than the Ryzen

~~~
trynumber9
Except in the multicore workloads. Which is why you'd buy a Zen chip.

~~~
vbezhenar
It depends of whether your tasks are able to fill all cores with useful work
all the time. Otherwise faster Intel would provide better value. I considered
between ThreadRipper and 8700K and decided to go with Intel for the time. I
can make use of ThreadRipper cores sometimes (project rebuild, reindexing,
heavy multitasking with launching numerous VMs, IDEs, games at the same time),
but 90% load will be on 1-2 cores and here Intel is clear winner, so having
those 15 idling cores won't help that much in my case. Now difference between
AMD and overclocked Intel is just too huge (30% or more), but I hope that with
new Zens they'll be closer and it might be easier choice (if I would give up
10% of single-thread performance for 10 more cores, I would choose otherwise).

------
dynamoa
I can completely disregard the rest of the review if the reviewer does not
know how to present benchmark graphs properly.

------
greggyb
Any reason to drop ThreadRipper from arbitrary benchmarks?

~~~
TwoNineA
8700K is mainstream like Ryzen. ThreadRipper and Intel X299 are high end
workstation chips.

~~~
greggyb
So why include ThreadRipper in _any_ of the benchmarks? Some include
ThreadRipper. Some include 7900X, some include one or the other. Some include
neither.

That's the confusing thing to me.

~~~
vbezhenar
I think that they tested TR on some tests earlier, so they included test
results if available. I guess, for gaming and workstation processors sets of
tests are different, but with some intersections.

------
HillaryBriss
i wonder if we'll be forced to buy an iMac Pro to get this chip in a mac

~~~
wmf
I expect the regular iMac to have Coffee Lake and the iMac Pro to have
Skylake-X Xeon W.

~~~
HillaryBriss
ah. the Xeon goes on the heavy workstation. got it. thanks.

------
katastic
"The best gaming CPU you can buy"\--if you've never heard of AMD or even
looked at other Intel CPUs.

It's basically just an ad.

~~~
mmanfrin
AMD is still at least a generation behind. They're more competitive in terms
of $/perf value, but the i7-7700K still beats all the new AMD chips except in
heavy-MC tasks, which gaming is not (outside of maybe GTA V).

~~~
katastic
I agree they're a gen behind.

However, my thesis statement would be, that's not that big a deal for 99% of
people:

\- CPU speeds aren't increasing quickly anymore. Last gen and current gen are
often like 20% different.

\- Most people (should?) care more about "Best performance I can get, for the
price I can afford." You have $100/$200 in your budget, and you buy the best
CPU you can when your old CPU can't run modern games. And AMD fits that quite
nicely.

\- Very few games "don't run" on an AMD. Heck, a last-gen AMD even. PUBG is
notoriously under-optimized and my FX-8370 runs it just fine even though my
"single-threaded" performance is complete crap compared to "the best of the
best" Intel has to offer.

But a company would have to be insane or stupid, to design their games to only
run on CPU's that cost >$400. The barrier-to-entry is too high.

\- Furthermore, since I/we have to upgrade every couple years, I'd rather not
buy a $600-800 CPU that's worth $25 in a few years. I'd rather pay $200 for a
CPU that's worth $25 in a few years. You may think I'm exaggerating (and
perhaps slightly) but I've literally had Xeon workstations and servers that
were worth thousands and their CPU can be found... for $25 on eBay.

I think it's great that many people have much larger disposable incomes than I
do. Geniunely, I'm happy for them. But spending >$600 on what will eventually
be a glorified room heater / paper-weight seems very wasteful. I'm all about
the best I can get, for a reasonable sum of money, and AMD (and Intel when
they compete on similar models!) fits into that realm. These "enthusiest"
grade CPUs are so expensive (and even worse the MOTHERBOARDS are >$300 for an
i9 or Threadripper!) that they might as well be fictional. I'll never see one
in real-life in the same way I'll never drive a Bughatti, so (in my opinion)
they're not relevant in your usual collection of datapoints. You wouldn't
compare a possible Toyota Camry to a Lambo and think "Well, the Lambo is so
much faster, which is important for my calculations on a possible grocery
getter car."

I currently play PUBG in 2560x1440 with my gens old, AMD FX-8370, and a GTX
1060. I could "almost" get 4K but it's only like 20-30 FPS. So if I've got
eight-cores (4 of which I use to run a full Win10 VM with SQL server), using a
one/two gen old CPU, and I can play the most modern games... what's the
benefit? Higher FPS? Sure. But the problem is, the cost-to-benefit ratio
(higher CPU $$ vs FPS) quickly goes to zero. You're not getting much more to
be "ahead of the technology curve." As long as you're high enough in the curve
to not be "unable to play modern games" you're set. If you spend bigger money
you're not actually increasing your longevity of your workstation by much. The
next gen will still make your "upper end" previous gen look like crap--
especially when you consider the premium price you paid.

It would be much better to just be patient, and buy the current gen, when the
next gen comes out. My current CPU dropped to HALF the price the second Ryzen
came out, and is 2nd to the top in terms of performance-per-dollar:

[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html)

My CPU has a mark of ~9000 and costs $100 and the highest i7 is 20,000. (~2x)
and costs... $1,600. 16 times the price for 2 times the performance and we can
still play the same games.

I'm considering (and saving for) a Ryzen build... except I'm waiting till
Ryzen 1.5 (<-actual thing) and 2.0 come out. I don't need to upgrade my
machine to "be cool." My machine is a tool, and as long as it does what I
want, it's fine. It compiles fast, it easily runs >180 chrome tabs, and can
run a VM and a video game at the same time. What's more to want? If it's video
encoding, the SSD's I have are 10x more important than the CPU.

~~~
subwayclub
You've got the strategy I've started using. After years of frustration from
cheap laptops that get hot and have poor battery life and can't really be
upgraded I recently switched to a computing strategy that seems to have
started well for me: Get a nice Chromebook, then use that to access a beefy PC
remotely(Chrome Remote is free and pretty simple to set up with just a bit of
port forwarding needed, and works fine on coffeeshop wifi).

But the "beefy PC" is actually a business SFF(ThinkCentre 715s) using the AMD
A12-9800 APU, the final version of Bulldozer and a starter for the AM4
platform. The only thing superlative about it is the amount of external
storage I added - a whole array of cheap USB flash, multiple HDDs, etc.

I actually splurged on that APU and could have gotten the A8-9600 for better
value, but I liked the idea of "maxing out" the old architecture.

Now my upgrade cycle will probably be: wait a year and then get whatever is
discounted then. By getting the APU now I already see a nice 2-4x improvement
over my last laptop, and I defer a decision on getting a discrete GPU. And
when I'm out the Chromebook gets me an all-day battery, local access to
Android and Ubuntu apps, and 80% of the Windows experience(some network
latency, and no remote audio) for productivity.

