Intel Core i5-8600K review shows Performance on par with 7700K

We recently got an early review of the Intel Coffee Lake flagship, the Core i7-8700K, published by Expreview. Just a few hours after this review surfaced, another Chinese website PCOnline leaked out a more comprehensive review of the Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8600K processors.

Since we’ve already covered the Core i7-8700K benchmarks in detail, this post will focus on the performance of Intel’s upcoming mid-range Core i5-8600K.

The review from PCOnline compares the 8600K in several benchmarks against the 7th Gen Core i7-7700K and AMD Ryzen processors. Before we dive into benchmarks, let’s take a quick look at i5-8600K specifications first.

Like its elder sibling, the Intel Core i5-8600K also has 6 cores but it will not feature hyper-threading capabilities. The chip is clocked at 3.5GHz base, 4.3GHz maximum Turbo, and 4.2GHz all-core boost. It also has an unlocked multiplier to make overclocking easier.

There’s 9 MB of L3 cache on board, while TDP is rated at 95W. The Core i5-8600K will cost USD $257 at launch.

Intel Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8600K Performance Benchmarks

We’ll start with Cinebench R15 benchmark. Here, the Core i5-8600K essentially is almost identical to the Core i7-7700K. The Coffee Lake chip is just a few points slower than 7700K in single-threaded test and around 80-ish points slower in multi-threaded test.

Same is the case with Fire Strike and Fritz Chess benchmarks where it lags behind the 7700K by a slight margin.

Things do, however, change when it comes to CPU-Z. The Core i5-8600K manages to gain a lead of around 200 points over 7700K whereas the single-core performance is almost identical with a difference of 25 points.

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Next up are the productivity benchmarks where the Core i7-8700K simply stomps the competition coming on par with AMD’s 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 1800X. The i5-8600K once again delivers performance similar to the flagship Kaby Lake chip.

Let’s move to game benchmarks. First, we have Rise of the Tomb Raider which is clearly GPU-focused with the game scaling beautifully between the processors. The Core i5-8600K achieves 70 fps average and slides right next to both Core i7 chips.

Ashes of the Singularity, as we know it, is a very multi-thread orientated title. Here, the Core i5-8600K outperforms the Core i7-7700K by 4 fps, but loses to the 12-thread power of the i7-8700K.

Similarly, the Core i5-8600K runs Ghost Recon Wildlands and The Division at decent frame rates. The performance is expected to further increase when new BIOSes roll out for boards in the coming weeks.

Power consumption on the i5-8600K is impressive too, with the chip drawing 381W average on heavy load compared to 392W on the 7700K, and 421W on the 8700K. In the below graph, the red line represents CPU heavy load, green represents CPU load when gaming, and yellow indicates CPU idle power consumption.

From the above benchmarks, the Core i5-8600K looks impressive hanging in there with the Core i7-7700K for less. It seems that the mid-range Coffee Lake is going to be the “gamers” CPU. It is actually a massive bang for buck for those who don’t need more than 6 threads.