Intel Core i7-8700K Review leaked, 42% Faster than 7700K in Multi-core Performance

Intel has officially unveiled their 8th Gen desktop processors, known as Coffee Lake. While it’s still ten days before the embargo lifts, folks over at Expreview have posted the Core i7-8700K review comparing the flagship chip of the lineup against the predecessor Core i7-7700K, and its Skylake-X counterpart, the Core i7-7800X.

Core i7-8700K Specifications – Intel’s First Hexa-Core CPU Clocked at 4.7GHz Boost

Built using the 14nm process node, the Intel Core i7-8700K features 6 cores and 12 threads. The chip has a base clock of 3.8GHz and a maximum Turbo of 4.7GHz. In fact, it offers several frequency ranges based on the amount of functional cores, which are as follows:

• Core i7-8700K 6 Core Clock Speed – 4.3 GHz
• Core i7-8700K 4 Core Clock Speed – 4.4 GHz
• Core i7-8700K 3 Core Clock Speed – 4.5 GHz
• Core i7-8700K 2 Core Clock Speed – 4.6 GHz

Furthermore, the chip has an unlocked multiplier to make overclocking easier. It packs 12 MB of L3 cache along with a GT2 tier iGPU. The TDP is rated at 95W.

The chip will only be compatible with Intel’s brand-new 300 series motherboard. It will support dual channel DDR4 memory clocked at native speeds of 2666 MHz and up to 4400 MHz+ (OC). The Core i7-8700K will cost USD $359 at launch.

Intel Core i7-8700K Review Leaked – Compared with Core i7-7700K and Core i7-7800X

The Core i7-8700K review compares the three different processors at stock and clock for clock scenarios. Before we dive into benchmarks, let’s take a look at the new flagship Coffee Lake chips first.

READ ALSO: Intel Core i3-7360X, A Dual Core Kaby Lake-X CPU for X299 Platform Leaked

Both Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake chips appear to be identical to the extent that it’s hard to distinguish the two without the labels. The changes are visible on the back, although they both use the same LGA 1151 socket.

Intel Core i7-8700K Synthetic and Office Benchmarks at Stock Clocks

Moving to the benchmarks, the processors are first compared at stock clocks where the Core i7-8700K outperforms the Core i7-7700K by 1.67% in single-core and 42.49% in multi-core performance.

The Coffee Lake chip is up to 11% faster than the Core i7-7800X but the latter offers 20% better performance in multi-core application tests thanks to its quad channel memory and AVX-512 instruction set.

In office application tests, the Core i7-8700K outperforms both the 7700K and 7800X by 8% and 7% respectively.

Intel Core i7-8700K Gaming Benchmarks at Stock Clocks

The Core i7-8700K shows a decent gaming performance as well, where it is 2% faster than the Core i7-7700K and 5% faster than the Core i7-7800X at stock frequencies. You can expect performance to further increase when new BIOSes hit the Z370 motherboards in the coming weeks.

Intel Core i7-8700K Synthetic and Office Benchmarks at Same Clocks

Finally, we have all three processors compared at the same frequencies. At 4.5GHz, the chips perform nearly the same in single-threaded tests but Core i7-8700K offers up to 45% better multi-core performance than the 7700K in general benchmarks.

Intel Core i7-8700K Gaming Benchmarks at Same Clocks

In the gaming workload performance at same clocks, the Core i7-8700K is 7-10% faster on average than the Core i7-7700K and Core i7-7800X.

Based on these benchmark results, the Core i7-8700K Coffee Lake CPU is looking really great for mainstream PC builders. The review, however, doesn’t detail some key metrics including power consumption numbers, overclocking and temperature. Hopefully, these details will be out when reviews officially hit the web on 5th October.