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Intel Coffee Lake-S: Core i7 8700K review

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  • Intel Coffee Lake-S: Core i7 8700K review

    The rumours are true. Intel's new Coffee Lake-S represents the biggest generational leap we've seen since the classic Sandy Bridge second-gen Core line, launched way back in 2011. The Core i5 2500K and i7 2600K were the stuff of legend - processors so good, many still use them today, convinced that Intel's iterative approach to CPU upgrades didn't justify replacing a solid platform. Coffee Lake-S has much in common with those classic processors: there's a big gen-on-gen upgrade, an immediately noticeable improvement to performance in all areas and excellent overclocking. The key to Coffee Lake's power is simple: a refined process technology allows for overall faster clocks, while the move from four to six cores in both i5 and i7 offers a massive increase to processing power.
    And to be frank, we've been waiting for a many-core processor to arrive that comprehensively trumps the mainstream i7 of the day. Whether we're talking about the current enthusiast-level Skylake-X or indeed Ryzen 7, the six and eight core chips released by Intel and AMD power through productivity and other multi-core heavy tasks, but fall a little short in gaming. What's interesting about Coffee Lake-S is that Intel hasn't repurposed its existing six-core processor - it's brand new. And instead of scaling down a many-core architecture specifically designed for server applications, it's upgraded its existing mainstream platform instead.
    As a result, the Core i7 8700K is a winner for several reasons. First of all, it takes the existing Kaby Lake/Skylake architecture and refines it, so the single-thread power that works so well for the mainstream line in gaming is fully retained here. Indeed it's very slightly faster owing to architectural tweaks, meaning that some of the single-core weakness we saw in Skylake-X isn't an issue here. And secondly, that refined process doesn't just allow for improved single-core turbo boost - it also paves the way to the first solid 5.0GHz-stable overclock we've achieved on Intel hardware. And that's all on top of those additional cores, which scale just as they should in heavily threaded workloads and prove far more potent in gaming than the six and eight-core i7 7800X and 7820X.
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