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Intel Core i7-8700K Review

editors choice horizontal
4.0
Excellent

The Bottom Line

With high clocks and hexa-core design, Intel's top eighth-generation/"Coffee Lake" desktop CPU impresses as a mainstream "do-it-all" processor. It's an excellent gamer, too, when paired with a high-end video card.

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Pros

  • 50 percent more cores and threads (and higher boost clocks) than previous-gen mainstream chips.
  • Best gaming performance we've seen at 1080p, when paired with a GTX 1080.
  • Consistently tops AMD's similarly priced Ryzen 7 1700X.

Cons

  • Higher MSRP than Core i7-7700K.
  • Requires a new motherboard, despite Z370 chipset offering no substantive new features.

To say 2017 has been a busy year for desktop-PC processors would be an understatement the size of Texas—or at least, Oregon. The best way to sum it all up might be to say, simply: In 2017, you'll get more cores (and more threads) for your CPU dollar than ever. That keeps getting reaffirmed as the year goes on—and it's not over yet. We still have the Intel Core i7-8700K ($379) to discuss.

But first, AMD kicked off the trend with its eight-core Ryzen 7 chips in March, topping out on that platform with the Ryzen 7 1800X ($235.00 at Amazon) . And the new-CPU conveyor belt really hasn't stopped running since then, with AMD following on with six-core Ryzen 5 chips like the Ryzen 5 1600X, and quad-core, four-thread Ryzen 3 options like the AMD Ryzen 3 1300X. Intel countered with impressive, expensive enthusiast-class offerings in a new family called the Core X-Series, topped by the 18-core Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edtion. That mega-chip made AMD's competing counterpart, the 16-core Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, seem downright reasonable at half the price ($999).

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Intel Core i7-8700K

Those are just the broad strokes of 2017's CPU happenings, which also include Intel's eighth-generation Core U-Series mobile chips. Those were just starting to trickle out into slim laptops and convertibles when we wrote this, promising quad-core performance in systems that previously had been offered only with dual-core silicon.

Now that you're acclimated with the silicon market as it stands today, it's time to take a look at the first of Intel's eighth-generation Core desktop processors, the family code-named "Coffee Lake." Much like the company's first eighth-generation mobile chips, the Core i7-8700K ($198.00 at Amazon) that we're looking at here, as well as the Core i5-8400 ($140.00 at Amazon) that we tested and reviewed in tandem with the new Core i7, are essentially built on the same architecture as the seventh-generation Core "Kaby Lake" processors (which were, in turn, very similar to the sixth-generation Core "Skylake" chips, like that family's head, the Core i7-6700K). Aside from some additional hardware that supports copy-protected 4K streaming for services like Netflix (which came in with the Kaby Lake chips), the basic architecture across these three generations is nearly the same, by Intel's own admission.

Intel Core i7-8700K

To be clearer about that aspect, the new eighth-generation chips are once again built around a 14-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process, though Intel dubs the process used with its latest chips "14nm++." Chips such as the Core i7-6700K (sixth-generation/Skylake) were the company's initial 14nm parts, while CPUs like the Core i7-7700K (seventh-generation/Kaby Lake) are built on a 14nm+ process. So hence, with this third iteration of the 14nm process, we arrive at 14nm++.

There are no 10nm chips to be found here, but because of this further refinement of Intel's manufacturing process, Intel has been able to crank up its top clock speeds as high as 4.7GHz for the Core i7-8700K that we're looking at here. To stick within the 95-watt thermal envelope, though, Intel has dropped the base clock of this chip to 3.7GHz, versus the 4GHz base of the previous-generation Core i7-7700K.

The real advancement, though, comes in the number of cores (and following from that, the maximum possible processing threads), in keeping with 2017's CPU theme. While Intel's previous-generation mainstream consumer processors topped out with four cores and eight computing threads in the past, the Core i7-8700K has six cores and 12 threads. And the Core i5-8400 has six cores and six threads. (It lacks Intel's thread-doubling Hyper-Threading technology that lets a core handle two processing threads at once.) That means, in theory at least, that these new chips are capable of up to a 50 percent performance boost in tasks that are able to take advantage of all available cores. And single-threaded performance (where Intel has long held a healthy lead) should be higher as well, thanks to higher top boost-clock speeds on these chips.

Intel Core i7-8700K

But can the six-core Core i7-8700K deliver the goods against similarly-priced AMD Ryzen 7 chips that have eight cores and 16 threads? And does Intel's new on-chip integrated graphics solution, dubbed Intel UHD Graphics 630, also provide a significant speed boost versus the previous generation integrated graphics processor (IGP)? To find out, of course, we'll have to delve deep into our benchmark testing. But first, we'll take a look at the eighth-generation Core platform as a whole, which includes six new chips at this stage, plus the new Z370 chipset.

"New chipset": Yes, that means you'll need a new motherboard to take advantage of Intel's Coffee Lake desktop processors. Are Intel's new chips worth a pricey, complicated upgrade? And what about gaming performance with a dedicated graphics card? We'll endeavor to answer all those questions and more below.

Intel Eighth-Generation Core: More Cores, Familiar Silicon

AMD grabbed headlines (and many favorable reviews) earlier this year by bringing more cores to mainstream-priced desktop processors with its Ryzen chips. Intel's offerings in this slice of the market had topped out at four cores and eight computing threads (via the company's thread-doubling Hyper-Threading tech) for years, and the only way to more cores and threads was with very pricey Extreme Edition CPUs. AMD doubled that quad-core ceiling with eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 chips, then followed that up with a pair of six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 offerings. The Ryzen 5 CPUs compete with Intel's four-core (four-thread) Core i5 chips like the Core i5-7600K.

Clearly, Intel was going to have to offer up a response to AMD's higher-core-count Ryzen chips at some point, and these Coffee Lake chips are arguably the first salvo. Specifically, we're looking at the six-core, 12-thread Core i7-8700K here, although we've also tested the six-core, six-thread Core i5-8400 at the same time. But these aren't the only new chips Intel is rolling out in this update. There are six chips in total in the new eighth-generation Core family (for now).

There's plenty to take in from the specs alone. For starters, the Core i7-8700K we're focusing on here is priced at about $20 more than what was the launch price of the Core i7-7700K that it's replacing. While it's never a great thing to see pricing creep up from one generation to the next, we don't think the bump is significant or unjustified here given the 50 percent increase in cores. Anyone prepared to spend more than $300 on a processor in the first place, and keen on maximum core/thread count, can find a way to cough up the extra Jackson.

Intel Core i7-8700K

Arguably more interesting is the chip's TDP (thermal design power, a measurement of heat-dissipation requirements), which Intel rates at 95 watts. That's just 4 watts higher than the four-core Core i7-7700K, despite the two additional cores. Given that the architecture with these eighth-generation Core chips is effectively the same as what's found in seventh-generation chips, Intel had to do some kind of jiggery-pokery to keep the Core i7-8700K from running significantly hotter than its predecessor.

Most of that seems to have happened with clock speeds. The Core i7-8700K's top Turbo Boost speed (4.7GHz) is 200MHz higher than the 4.5GHz ceiling of the Core i7-7700K. But the new chip's base clock of 3.7GHz is 300MHz lower than the 4GHz base clock of the older CPU. We'll have wait for benchmarks to see how that translates to performance, but we'll say here that the lower base clock didn't seem to cause any negative performance issues other than, perhaps, a bit more variance, run-to-run, in our benchmark tests than previous chips.

Intel Core i7-8700K

Other additions with these new chips include more total cache and a bump up in officially supported RAM speeds (to 2,666MHz, with the Core i5 and i7 chips). Note, though, that Intel has long been conservative with its rated RAM support. Memory makers have offered kits with higher-than-spec RAM speeds for years. Indeed, the G.Skill Trident Z memory we used for our testing is rated to 3,600MHz, and it ran at that setting just fine during our testing.

Eighth-Generation Platform and Z370 Chipset

As for the platform as a whole, there's not a whole lot that's new, beyond the new chips and a new chipset. The eighth-generation Core chips drop into the same LGA 1151 socket that was used for sixth- and seventh-generation chips. But though the socket is shaped the same as before (and is compatible with the same cooling solutions), Intel says you'll need a new Z370-chipset-based motherboard to use one of the new eighth-generation chips. And you can't put one of the older Skylake or Kaby Lake chips in the new motherboards, either.

The reason, according to Intel, is that the company had to beef up its power-delivery circuitry for the additional cores in the new chips. While there may well be electrical and thermal reasons that necessitate new motherboards, it's no consolation for those who recently bought a now previous-generation Z270 motherboard and would like to upgrade to one of these new chips. Given that Z270 just officially launched alongside the Core i7-7700K in January of 2017, the life cycle of the seventh-generation desktop chips and their accompanying platform seems cruelly short. Not that older chips and boards will be disappearing overnight, but desktop platforms and their accompanying chipsets/motherboards usually have a longer shelf life than just nine months before being relegated to last-generation status. No doubt, plenty of consumers who bought a new Z270 motherboard this past spring or summer will be unhappy to learn how their new board suddenly becomes a dead-end platform in the same year.

Intel Core i7-8700K

But what of the new Z370 chipset, then? Does it offer up substantive new features versus the Z270 it's replacing after less than a year? The short answer: no.

While the key board makers such as Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI, no doubt, will find new features to add to their Z370 motherboards, the new stuff that Intel brings to the table with the chipset is pretty much down to improved power delivery for those extra cores and overclocking, as well as official support for faster memory. And remember that, for enthusiasts and gamers, that memory-speed boost is effectively meaningless, as RAM that runs at faster speeds has been available for a long time.

So, we have six new chips, which are a whole lot like the previous-generation parts, just with more cores and slightly higher clocks, and a new platform that's also very similar to what came before it, just with extra circuitry to handle the power demands of those extra cores. What about the IGP on these chips, for those who don't care much about gaming? Well, for starters, it's important to remember that AMD's Ryzen chips don't have any integrated graphics at all, necessitating the use of a dedicated graphics card. For those who don't care much about gaming, that pushes things in Intel's favor, because you don't have to buy a graphics card with Team Blue's CPUs if you don't want to. And unless you have an older graphics card that you can carry over, even a low-end current-gen graphics card from AMD or Nvidia will set you back at least $70 these days.

Intel Core i7-8700K

As for the integrated UHD Graphics 630 found on the eighth-generation Core chips, Intel told us the underlying silicon is basically the same as last generation's HD Graphics 630, though users should see some improved performance thanks to a slightly higher ceiling on the IGP's clock (what Intel calls the "Graphics Max Dynamic Frequency"). But looking at the numbers, that spec for the UHD Graphics 630 on the Core i7-8700K has jumped by only 50MHz, from 1.15GHz on the Core i7-7700K, to 1.2GHz on the new six-core chip. So expect only modest gains in frame rates on that front, as we'll see later in testing. But a more dramatic bump in frame rates does come when you pair this chip with a dedicated graphics card and set your resolution to 1080p. When paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, this chip delivered higher frame rates at 1080p than any other chip we've tested to date.

First, though, on to the CPU tests to see what six cutting-edge Intel cores can do against eight from AMD.

For our test setup, we dropped the Core i7-8700K into the Asus ROG Strix Z3470-I Gaming motherboard of our new Coffee Lake testbed PC, along with 32GB of dual-channel G.Skill Trident Z memory, running at 3,600MHz. The Crucial BX300 (240GB)$87.99 at Amazon was our SATA-interface boot drive. We stuck all those components into the SilverStone Redline Series RL06$86.88 at Amazon case, and used a DeepCool Gamer Storm Captain 240EX$99.99 at Amazon liquid cooler for CPU cooling.

Intel Core i7-8700K

The Core i7-8700K sits at the top of Intel's stack of new mainstream consumer chips, above the six-core, six-thread Core i5-8400 that we tested in tandem with this chip, and edging out the now-previous-generation, four-core Core i7-7700K . The chief competition from the AMD side in the same price range is the AMD Ryzen 7 1700X ($225.00 at Amazon) . We added the less-expensive Ryzen 7 1700 ($195.00 at Amazon) and more-expensive Ryzen 7 1800X to our charts below, too, for some perspective.

From Intel's enthusiast Core X-Series platform, we also added the four-core Core i7-7740X ($250.00 at Amazon) and the eight-core Core i7-7820X ($375.00 at Amazon) to round out our charts, along with the middle chip in AMD's enthusiast Threadripper platform, the well costlier, 12-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X ($270.00 at Amazon) .

Intel Core i7-8700K

The Core i7-8700K should easily outpace its previous-generation Core i7-7700K counterpart on multi-core tests, thanks to its pair of extra cores. But it will be interesting to see how it does against AMD's similarly priced Ryzen 7 1700X, which has lower base and boost clock speeds, but more cores (eight) and threads (16) than Intel's new six-core, 12-thread chip. On to the benchmarks.

Cinebench R15

First up in our testing regimen: Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads, using the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Along with the usual test that makes use of all available cores, we've added the single-core results here to get a sense of how Intel's six-core chip fares in lightly threaded workloads.

cinebench

As we would expect, the Intel Core i7-8700K easily bested the AMD Ryzen 7 1700X (and every other chip we've tested at stock settings) on the single-core test, though the Core i7-7700K was only about 7 percent behind. The Ryzen 7 1700X was 25 percent behind Intel's new flagship chip when using one core. But switching over the "All Cores" portion of this test, the Ryzen 7 1700X and Core i7-8700K were pretty much even. Given the AMD chip has two more physical cores and four more computing threads, though, that's a feather in the i7-8700K's cap.

iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test

We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Encoding Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a single CPU core, as much legacy software still does.

itunes

Music encoding doesn't push a modern CPU to its limits, and certainly not high-end ones like these. But this is precisely the kind of test that shows Intel's chips to their best advantage. Intel's recent Skylake and Kaby Lake architectures do better than AMD's Zen on single-threaded or lightly threaded tasks, and the higher clock speed of this new Coffee Lake Core i7 chip puts it even further ahead of anything that AMD currently has to offer. That said, unless you're hanging on to some very old programs, most software that can take good advantage of multiple cores and threads has been updated to do so at this point. (And it would be overkill to buy a chip this pricey and limit it to that kind of stuff.) So while this is a clear win for Intel, the real-world applications of this muscle aren't as big a deal.

Handbrake 0.9.9

This is a time-consuming test of video-crunching capabilities. Handbrake, a tool commonly used for converting videos from one format to another, benefits from having lots of cores and threads at your disposal. In this test, we use a nice, big hunk of 4K video to see how the chips perform with a sustained job of this kind. We tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-minute-and-14-second 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase short film Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video.

Handbrake

On this first real-world test that takes advantage of lots of cores and threads, we see that Intel has bridged the gap—and then some—between its top mainstream Core i7 chip and AMD's similarly priced Ryzen 7 1700X. Intel's lead here isn't massive, but considering it has two fewer cores than the 1700X, its performance is impressive. Also note that the Core i7-8700K bested the four-core Core i7-7700K by about 35 percent here, making the newer Intel chip much better suited things like speedy video editing.

POV-Ray 3.7

Next up, using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV-Ray benchmark. It challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing. After that, again to get a sense of how the Core i9 handles single-core performance, we ran the same benchmark using the "One CPU" setting.

pov

Once again, the Core i7-8700K easily outpaced all competing AMD chips on the single-core test here. And it did quite well on the "All CPUs" setting as well, edging out the 1700X and nearly catching the pricier Ryzen 7 1800X. You'd have to step up to the $799 Ryzen Threadripper 1920X to do substantially better here. And you'd be in for an expensive motherboard outlay, as well, if you went the Threadripper route. Those X399 boards start at about $340. (You'd need to spring for a Threadripper-compatible cooler, too.)

Blender 2.77a

Blender is an open-source 3D content-creation program that can be used to design and create visual effects, animations, and 3D models for use in environments such as video games or 3D printing. We open a standard test file (it's of a flying squirrel) and time how long the test processor takes to finish the render.

Blender

The lesser, lower-clocked Ryzen 7 chips didn't look good here, but all of the Intel chips on this chart performed similarly on this test. Technically, though, the Core i7-8700K landed in the lead, and its score on this test showed no variation (beyond a couple of tenths of a second) across a bunch of test runs. Even the more-expensive Ryzen 7 1800X was about 30 percent behind Intel's six-core Core i7 here.

7-Zip File Compression

Last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file-compression software and ran its built-in compression/decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's multi-core abilities.

7zip

Interestingly, this test has often shown AMD's chips in a favorable light this year, as it tends to heavily favor lots of cores and threads. And for most of 2017, Intel's chips have been lagging on that front—compared to similarly priced AMD offerings. But apparently, with the addition of 50 percent more cores and some higher clock speeds, Intel has propelled the Core i7-8700K beyond even the pricier Ryzen 7 1800X—on this test, anyway. Intel's new six-core flagship chip landed 17 percent ahead of the Ryzen 7 1700, 11 percent ahead of the pricier 1800X, and a stunning 62 percent ahead of the Core i7-7700K it's effectively replacing. Even the $599 eight-core Core i7-7820X was only about 10 percent ahead of the Core i7-8700K here. For video editors who also do some gaming on the side, this may be a "sweet-spot" chip that's tough to ignore.

Overclocking

As is often the case, we didn't have a whole lot of time to try tweaking every setting to achieve the best possible overclock. But with our DeepCool liquid cooler, it was fairly easy to push the Core i7-8700K up to an even 5GHz on all six cores. At that setting, our test bed was stable and able to run our benchmarks without any observable throttling or crashing. When we pushed the chip up to 5.1GHz, however, we experienced intermittent lockups and blue-screen crashes.

Pegging all six cores at 300MHz above the chip's top stock Turbo Boost speed did result in some modest gains in our bench tests. At 5GHz, our Core i7-8700K chip delivered a Cinebench R15 score of 1,619, a 5 percent bump over the stock score of 1,542. And on Handbrake, we were able to transcode our 4K test file 6 seconds faster (in 6:40 when overclocked, versus 6:46 at stock).

These aren't massive jumps, of course. But we suspect that veteran overclockers will likely be able to achieve higher stable clocks with more time than we had to test two CPUs under deadline. The temperature of the CPU cores never became an issue in our testing, which is a departure from what we saw with Intel's recent Core X-Series chips, specifically the ones with lots of cores, such as the 18-core Intel Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition. That chip's cores often got up to and above 100 degrees C during our overclocking, despite the large triple-fan-radiator liquid cooler we used. The Core i7-8700K doesn't seem to have any serious cooling issues, which is what we'd expect given its 95-watt TDP.

Integrated Graphics Performance

As noted earlier, the Intel UHD Graphics 630 integrated graphics on the Core i7-8700K differs from the HD Graphics 630 solution in the Core i7-7700K only on clock speed. The older chip has a top speed of 1.15GHz, while the new chip can hit 1.2GHz. What's that 50MHz bump get you? Not a whole lot, but more than you might think if you keep your gaming resolutions low.

In Futuremark's 3DMark Cloud Gate test (which Futuremark posits is best for testing basic non-gaming PCs), we saw a Graphics Subscore of 11,571 with the Core i7-8700K, up about 23 percent from the 9,416 we saw when testing the Core i7-7700K. But stepping up to the higher-end 3DMark Fire Strike test, the newer chip actually delivered a score that was about 5 percent lower than the previous-generation Core i7 chip. Granted, the Fire Strike test is designed to test serious, dedicated graphics cards, not integrated GPUs, but we didn't expect a lower score there. Repeated runs didn't help the Coffee Lake Core i7 do any better on that test, either.

Of course, when it comes to gaming, it's really only frame rates that matter. And on that front, the Core i7-8700K did better than its predecessor. On 2013's Tomb Raider on the Normal preset at 1080p resolution, the six-core Coffee Lake chip delivered 35.1fps, 2fps better than the 32.8fps we saw with the Kaby Lake Core i7.

Other older titles showed similar minor improvements at 1080p, with the biggest jump coming in Sleeping Dogs (on the Medium setting, also at 1080p resolution), where the new six-core chip turned in a frame rate of 40.9fps to the previous-generation four-core chip's 36.3fps.

Bottom line? The higher clock speed of the Core i7-8700K does deliver somewhat improved performance, and it should be able to handle older titles at 1080p and below reasonably well at modest detail settings. But when we ran the more recent (2015) Rise of the Tomb Raider title at the Very High preset, the integrated graphics in Intel's new chip was able to muster only 7.3fps. Clearly, if any kind of serious gaming is your aim, you're going to need a dedicated graphics card. And as we'll see in the next section, if you pair this chip with a high-end card, you should get about the best performance possible from that card than with any CPU we've tested to date.

Dedicated Graphics Performance

Until this year, we never really did dedicated graphics testing with processors, because the specific graphics card in play tended to have a much greater impact on your performance than the processor—especially when you're talking about fairly high-end chips like the Core i7-8700K. But when the Ryzen chips came along, it was clear pretty quickly that they under-performed competing Intel chips when gaming at mainstream resolutions like 1080p (1,920x1,080 pixels). To measure how the Ryzen chips performed with a high-end card compared to Intel's Core i5s and i7s at the time, we installed an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (Founders Edition) ($549.00 at NVIDIA) graphics card in both our Intel and AMD testbeds and ran a few of the games we use for testing graphics cards.

It turned out that, at launch, Intel's Ryzen 7 chips tended to lag significantly behind Intel's chips, though performance tended to even out when stepping up to 4K resolution (3,840x2,160), at which resolution the video was the limiting factor to frame rates, not the CPU. And as we've tested more Intel and AMD chips throughout 2017, that's generally held true. So of course, with the launch of these eighth-generation parts from Intel, we wanted to see if the company could manage to pull even further ahead of AMD on the 1080p gaming front.

To keep things as fair as possible, we re-tested the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X (after making sure our motherboard's BIOS and chipsets were up to date) alongside the new chips from Intel, with the same GTX 1080 graphics card. (We wanted to be sure the Ryzen platform was benefiting from any late improvements.) Below, you can see how things shook out with our test titles, as well as how the new chips compared to the Core i7-7700K and the AMD's top-end Ryzen Threadripper 1950X.

dedicated

These are interesting results, and unquestionably impressive ones for Intel. At 1080p resolution, the Core i7-8700K delivers 15fps more than the Core i7-7700K it's replacing on Rise of the Tomb Raider, and 7fps more on Far Cry Primal. Compared to the Ryzen 7 1800X, the Core i7-8700K dominates, pulling 30fps ahead of the AMD chip on Rise of the Tomb Raider and a stunning 53fps on Far Cry Primal. Again, these numbers are all at 1080p. If you step up to 4K resolution, the processor is pretty much removed as a bottleneck and all the chips here deliver between 47fps and 49fps.

Now, while the result here for the Core i7-8700K is undoubtedly good, delivering the best performance at 1080p we've seen from any chip running at stock settings, the fact remains that almost no one should be spending over $300 on a processor these days specifically for gaming at 1080p. That's especially true when, as we also see in the chart above, Intel's sub-$200 Core i5-8400 delivers performance that's nearly as good. (We dare you to tell the difference between 143fps and 138fps with eyes—naked or otherwise.) If gaming at 1080p is your primary aim, or even a serious second, the Core i5 chip is clearly a better value. And the money you'd save by stepping down to it would be much better spent on a higher-end graphics card or a more spacious solid-state drive (SSD).

And to be fair to AMD, while its chips can't keep up with similarly priced Intel silicon at 1080p, the Ryzen 7 1800X and Threadripper 1950X charted above still deliver very smooth performance at that resolution. If you're a competitive gamer with a 120Hz-or-higher monitor, you should look to Intel. But for everyone else who typically aims to run games in the 60fps range, AMD's parts are still more than good enough for smooth game play.

Conclusion

There isn't much not to like about the Core i7-8700K. Our only quibbles are the $20-pricier MSRP at launch than the Core i7-7700K that it's replacing at the top of Intel's mainstream CPU stack, and the fact that (as is often the case with Intel) you'll need a new motherboard to run it. Despite the fact that it has six cores to the eight found on AMD's competing Ryzen 7 chips, it generally outpaced the similarly priced Ryzen 7 1700X, and sometimes bested even the Ryzen 7 1800X in our testing.

Intel Core i7-8700K

Add to that the fact that this Core i7 chip excels in the one area where the Ryzen chips are weak—namely, 1080p gaming performance with a high-end dedicated graphics card—and the Core i7-8700K is inarguably a powerful option for those who do demanding tasks such as video editing, but who also do some serious gaming on the side. In these days when seemingly every other person building or upgrading a PC is a digital content creator or editor of some kind, we have a feeling that adds up to a whole lot of people.

The only thing working against this chip, at this point, is the sheer number of good processor options available—in some cases, some of these are better suited to particular niches. If 1080p gaming at high frame rates is your primary concern, for example, you're probably better off opting for the lesser Core i5-8400. Its gaming performance isn't quite as good, but if you put the $175 or so that you'll save by stepping down from the Core i7 chip into a higher-end video card, you'll make up that difference by miles in frame rates. Likewise, if thread-hungry tasks like video editing are your primary concern, and where you make your money, you're better off stepping up to one of the higher-end platforms and a chip with substantially more than six cores. On that front, the 12-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X will save you lots of rendering time, though you will have to invest in a pricier motherboard and some sort of graphics card for a system built around that chip.

Intel Core i7-8700K

Another factor—motherboard cost—is impossible for us to gauge at the point when we're writing this, before the launch of these chips and the accompanying Z370 platform. It's easy to look at the raw performance numbers of the Core i7-8700K and competing Ryzen 7 1700X in isolation and proclaim Team Blue's silicon as a better option. But Intel tells us you'll need a Z370 motherboard to run its new eighth Generation Core chips, with no mention of the lesser chipsets, which often provide many of essential features for a mainstream build at a lower price point than the flagship chipset (which Z370 represents, in this case). As a result, compatible boards for this chip may be pricey for a while. Meanwhile on the AMD Ryzen side, there are attractive B350-chipset boards with fancy features like LED illumination and M.2 connectors available today for $80 or less. So, at least until Intel releases inexpensive board options for its eighth-generation CPUs, AMD may hold some of the value ground when you consider the cost of the potential build as a whole.

But one thing is clear: While it's not exactly a crushing blow, Intel has delivered a strong response to AMD's Ryzen 7 offerings with the Core i7-8700K, in both single-core and multi-threaded workloads, as well as when it comes to gaming performance with a dedicated card at resolutions at or near 1080p. AMD, of course, could drop the prices of its Ryzen chips in response. But it's unclear whether the company is in a position to do that. We'll just have to see.

Intel Core i7-8700K
4.0
Editors' Choice
Pros
  • 50 percent more cores and threads (and higher boost clocks) than previous-gen mainstream chips.
  • Best gaming performance we've seen at 1080p, when paired with a GTX 1080.
  • Consistently tops AMD's similarly priced Ryzen 7 1700X.
Cons
  • Higher MSRP than Core i7-7700K.
  • Requires a new motherboard, despite Z370 chipset offering no substantive new features.
The Bottom Line

With high clocks and hexa-core design, Intel's top eighth-generation/"Coffee Lake" desktop CPU impresses as a mainstream "do-it-all" processor. It's an excellent gamer, too, when paired with a high-end video card.

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About Matt Safford

Matt is a self-described Net nerd, gadget geek, and general connoisseur of off-kilter culture. A graduate of the first class of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, his work has appeared in Popular Science, Consumer Reports, Smithsonian, and elsewhere in the ether. You'll often find him writing while walking on his treadmill desk, surrounded by heaps of consumer tech. (But really, he prefers the low-tech scenery of the Scottish Highlands and the hills of Japan.)

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