Intel launches volcanic 4-6 core Coffee Lake-based 8th generation processors; hottest gaming CPU ever!

Release date: October 5th, 2017

Primary use case: Heating an apartment building in the winter.

Specs and pricing:

Early benchmarks: http://www.expreview.com/57166-all.html

How Xbox One X's custom CPU stacks up: At least it won't burn your house down.

With 8 cores on Ryzen and 6 cores on Intel, the consumer CPU landscape has now changed... due to the fire burning everything. The 8600K brings 7700K performance at at the price of an i5. The 8700K will be the ideal game streaming and house warming CPU. Consoles continue to fall behind more and more, and with Intel moving to 8 cores late next year, AMD moving to 12 cores in 2019, and Volta and Navi coming to shake up GPUs next year, PC will continue to reign supreme. This is why I stick with PC and Nintendo; there's no point to a "powerful" console that can barely do half of what a PC can do, so consoles are only worth buying for exclusives. After this upgrade, my PC will make your console of choice look like a Switch by comparison, but with worse exclusives. Lol.

On a more serious note, which option looks best to you more budget-oriented PC gamers: the 8350K, the 8600K, or the Ryzen 5 1600? I'm curious on what you'll answer. Also, does having an overclockable Intel quad-core at such a low price make some of you want to consider a switch to PC gaming?

Coffee-lake based. Is this an actual thing?

i5 8600K with 6 cores/threads has really now peak my interest for my next PC build. I really don't care about hyperthreading, so the i5 8600K is the real winner for me. i5 8600K+GTX 1070Ti will make a nice edition to my future build :)

Also: "How Xbox One X's custom CPU stacks up: lol"

You could've just NOT mention about X1X! This is a PC gamer news, leave the consoles out of this!

@davillain-: It's System Wars. There needs to be a little trolling at least.

@freedomfreak: Coffee Lake is the name of the architecture of this release.

1) PS4 no exclusives ?? Good to know !

2) Wait , so if my PC will make Pro/X1X look like a Switch by comparison ... then when you compare it to a Switch thats mean ... Nooooooo ! Dont tell me will look something like Wii or worse !? No way !

3) Old news , PC master race for a reason

@techhog89: Fair enough I supposed :)

@techhog89: Yep, and the i3 8350K is on par with the 7700K in a lot of benchmarks. Pretty sick.

@AzatiS: It does but outside of Naughty Dog it's all experiences really similar to what you can find elsewhere, while Nintendo's stuff is more unique.

And pretty much, but Switch at least offers something different. Sony and Microsoft are just selling slow, dumbed-down PCs with mostly the same games. Basically, if you only want one platform PC offers the most. If you want two, PC + Nintendo offers the best range of experiences. And PC + Nintendo + Sony means that you get literally everything, of course. That said, Wii seems like it's a lot more than a generation behind Switch in terms of power, so maybe Vita or 360 is a better comparison.

8370K will now be the best budget CPU, how do all of these compare to Rysen?

Wow, 8700K at $360. I saw a leaked price list that had the thing at ₤400 in the UK, and I was really concerned that I might have to settle for a 8700 or a 8600K. This looks much better for me.

Benchmarks I've seen also suggest they've actually improved the IPC this time around, which is very nice. The only concern I have left now is heat, but this is actually looking very good for me.

IPC is the same or slightly lower.

@techhog89 said:

IPC is the same or slightly lower.

Well, damn. I guess that's a conflicting information, then. Benchmarks I've seen put 8700K and 7700K at about neck-and-neck despite the 8700K being clocked lower.

I suppose I'll have to look for more benchmarks.

@madrocketeer: It's not clocked lower. Base clocks don't matter, since with decent cooling it'll always be boosting. It's effectively clocked slightly higher, by about 200MHz, in similar workloads.

Sorry but you generalize your opinion here. Sony offering the best or one of the best when it comes to many exclusive games on their respective genres over and over and over.

You talking about power that will make PS4/X1 looking like switch then you change that to what is "more unique". Zelda and Mario are unique indeed but not Kart and Smash. Might look unique to you but actually is the very same 20 years old formula with small additions left and right.

On the other hand Sony offering new IPs after new IPs constantly. Last but not least with PS console you know youll be getting massive amount of games till the very end something that Nintendo is not doing for over a decade now. PC master race for a reason. Next to it , a shiny PS4 and then for few exclusives if you wanna spend money , go for Switch. Thats the order. Botw 4k anyone ?

The funny thing is that ... EVERY single one of you calling Switch the best already and how PS4 suddenly sucks or is not ideal , own a PS4. Not even a single guy of you all is not a PS4 owner whatever you saying so that proves my point further.

Whatever the case , everything is secondary to PC , it doesnt matter who is second or third based on taste. What it matters is who is the chieftain , the captain and thats PC. Everything else doesnt matter. Botw 4k PC exclusive, nuff said

Actually you should care about HT. Many games nowadays are being coded to use 8 threads or more ( its becoming the norm). While the i5 8600k maybe has 50% more processing power over current quad core i7's (4 vs 6 cores) , those i7's still are able to handle 8 threads. 6 cores will end up being what i5's are experiencing now in a few years suffering from context switching and possibly pegged core usage. If you can I would grab i7 8700 or 8700k over the i5. A good example is Gears of war 4 FX 8350 is able to provide 7 more minimum fps more than 6th gen i5 6600 (67 vs 60), even though FX is over 50% slower clock per clock. Threads do matter

I really wonder if 6 core will ever become standard

or if the jump will be 4 core > 8 core

1070 is a dumb buy right now at its current prices. For some reason a 1080 only costs $50 more. Definitely get a 1080 if prices don't change by the time you buy.

@techhog89: never heard of expreview.com, and the webpage is in chinese.

Everything else i've seen on the 7800x points to it being considerably slower in tasks that don't utilize all 6 cores, due to the fact that it's actually a ring bus/ 8 core part with 2 cores disabled.

Seems very odd to see it so far ahead all of a sudden in multi-threaded as well. If it is, the only difference must be due to quad channel vs dual channel memory, but I really can't see it making THAT much of a difference.

Well Ryzen had a good run...

The 8700 and 8600 are gonna whoop the entire Ryzen lineup and for a decent price. Looking at those boost clocks, these chips will probably hit 5GHz while Ryzen is struggling to hit 4GHz. I'm glad I didn't purchase any parts for the mitx gaming build I want to do. I would be returning the CPU and mobo after seeing this!

That price if for 1000 CPUs. Customers buying only one have to pay more! so expect to be around $400 after the retailers mark it up

AMD will drop their price I can see the 1600x going for $199usd in the next week or so. They well still sell just fine. Got the 1600 for $250.ca the pre-order for the 8700k is $550.ca so I would be looking at over $600 with tax that is more the my ryzen build, Ram, motherboard and cpu.

I'd be interested to see a i7-8700k vs i5-4690k benchmark in CPU intensive games.

I actually missed the bit about pricing being mass unit based.

@Addict187: yeah except the 8700K is in no way comparable to a Ryzen 1600. Just because they both have 6 cores doesn't mean much.

I would put money on the 8350K trashing the 1600 in most games. Especially once overclocked.

It will be a cold day in hell before the 7700k comes close to 8600k performance

@commander: they'll be comparable. 7700K will likely retain the single core/overclock performance, yet still be ok in multi-thread thanks to HT.

I'd still rather 6 true cores over 8 virtual though.

Well yes the 8700k will be better then 1600 I would hope so it cost's two times as much. 8350K trashing the 1600 in most games LOL now that's funny

b..b..bu..but Ryzen bios updates and 3600MHz RAM ;_;

b..b..bu..but that nitpicked chart from that random youtube video ;___;

8350k will be roughly the same performance as 7600k i5, so depends on game and how much OC

Actually no, he's not really correct. This isn't what Intel charges per unit to retailers, but rather what Intel recommends that retailers who bought these wholesale sell the CPUs at. This cost is usually right around where they end up at retail, and in fact they're often cheaper than that after a month or two. Case in point: the 1k price for the 7700K is $339-350. It launched at $350 for big retailers who buy thousands of units and is on sale for much less now. So don't worry, it's going to be in the $360-370 for us still, so long as you buy from a retailer which purchases large volumes of these.

sure faster architecture with 50 percent more cores, the hyperthreading ain't going to make up for that.

@commander: It's the same architecture.

still faster clock speed though, and much higher cache.

@Addict187: games that use 4 or less threads will unquestionably run faster on the 8350K

It's basically the 7700K with no HT.

I've been rocking my i5-3570K since early 2013. Been waiting for a meaningful upgrade to my rig.

@commander: it's not really faster clockspeed either.

The 8600K MAY be able to hit the same OC as the 7700K, but it's not a guarantee.

It can if the games requires 8 threads to perform properly. You can still run into contexting issues with a 6 core cpu vs a quad core with 8 threads. For example in gears of war 4 the measly FX 8350 was able to provide more than a 10% fps gain in minimum fps vs 6th gen i5 6600. while only being 10 fps shy on averages both using GTX 1080 at 1080p. Threads do serve a purpose even when your more than 50% slower clock per clock

Not impressed. Call me when there's a significant IPC performance gain, I guess the next gen of consoles will probably push them to make better CPUs.

OC'ed? How's it fairing in modern games?

Same here

So uhhhhh, what does this mean in English?

@stuff238: it means that very soon it will be an amazing time to build a budget pc!

@stuff238: MOAR CORES

All that power only for indies. lol Enjoy buying a new Motherboard every two years! hahahhahaha Intel and AMD knows that they have suckers for customers.

2019 PCI 4.0 and DDR 5 so buying a new board ever two years. lol

@xhawk27: GR8 B8 M8.

It's true, at least for Intel seems like every two years a new motherboard format.

About damn time we're past dual core.

Also hell yes to competitive pricing. Let the CPU wars resume!

top i7's have always faster clockspeeds than the I5's, here the difference is less because coffee lake is running at higher clock speeds.

This while having two cores more, it's not much of a contest.

@xhawk27: Right, but you're making the implication that one HAS to upgrade their board every 2 years.

I'm still running modern games on a motherboard that's over 7 years old, at better settings than any console including "mighty one X" can achieve.

@commander: You seem to be arguing that the 8600K will be a better cpu than the 7700K. Nobody here including myself is disagreeing.

I'm merely stating that the difference won't be as massive as you would think.

For all the hype over multi-threading, there still isn't an awful lot (aside from some outliers like GTAV, AOTS etc) that can make good use of more than 4 cores. And the ones that do, still see a decent boost from HT.

Yeah but you aren't going to put in a new CPU from Intel. New standards for PCI 4.0 and DDR 5 are going to be out in 2019. PC technology is very fast changing and you have to pay for that too.